Poet, memoirist, and novelist John Burnside (1955–2024) was among the most acclaimed writers of his generation. His poetry received numerous awards: The Hoop and Common Knowledge won Scottish Arts Council Book Awards; Feast Days received the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; The Asylum Dance won the Whitbread Poetry Award and was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Poetry and the T.S. Eliot Prize; Black Cat Bone earned both the Forward and T.S. Eliot Prizes; and his final collection, Ruin, Blossom, was posthumously awarded the Saltire Society Poetry Book of the Year Award. A Professor of Creative Writing at the University of St. Andrews, Burnside was recognized in 2023 with the David Cohen Prize for lifetime achievement in literature.
Selected poems
by John Burnside
Deliver me from nothing, save the thrill
of perish; place my next breath on the scales
as counterweight to all I know of guile.
Let nothing be so precious as to
linger through a night of summer rain,
when everything is cleansed: the heart, the tongue,
the love of ruins, kinship, wildering;
and let me not forget the scintillance
of new snow in the trees
by Brewster’s Yard,
beech mast on the farm roads
flecked with ice, that constant
singing in the fence wire, like the hum
that lingers on, when storyline is done.
Shelter me now, but send me on my way
at daybreak, when the town I could have loved
is locked in sleep, too perfect to recall:
shuttered kiosks, windows bleared with dew,
house martins threading the streets
in the fretwork of dawn.
Copyright © 2024, John Burnside, Ruin: Blossom, Cape Poetry