I wonder how we know the things we know

most surely

with no hope of evidence

and lacking a faith

that might extend to heaven

These lines are from the first sequence of poems, ‘Responses to Augustine of Hippo’. At a public reading before Gift Songs was published, Burnside said that this had been his original title for the collection, but his publisher felt it would seem too much ‘like a religious tract’.  Burnside paused, before adding with a chortle, ‘maybe it is a religious tract’. Gift Songs is a meditation on faith by a poet who is more than sceptical of religion.  The titles of two sequences ‘Varieties of Religious Experience’ and ‘For a Free Church’ suggest this polarity (such titles, reminiscent of early Geoffrey Hill, hint at a leaning in Burnside towards high-church poetics, a sort of friendly modernism). Across this collection, in poems separated by location and focus, the same words recur: prayer, faith, soul, but also ‘the self’. An intelligent perception of selfhood is in constant battle with a search for faith, an impulse to believe: ‘and it isn’t a choice I would make,/to rise again//but somewhere between/this one life and the next//I imagine a point/where the soul//is purified’.

If there is a belief in anything, it is built on that which pervades his other collections, the reality of experience in the present, being grounded in ‘the here and now’ (‘Coyotes (Sonora)’).  Here is one of two poems called ‘Prayer’:

Give me a little less

with every dawn:

colour, a breath of wind,

the perfection of shadows,

till what I find, I find

because it’s there,

gold in the seams of my hands

and the night light, burning.

Later, this idea is repeated, when a sign in French is ‘an invocation, maybe, or a prayer/but, really, all there is is what it says’, or he is found wanting a fictional version of reality: ‘why does it never happen as it does/in picture books’, ‘nothing will come in a form I could recognise,//no story book figure’. The last two quotations suggest an adult’s, perhaps embittered, attitude towards the beliefs of childhood, a wish for a childlike faith.  Last year Burnside published a well-received memoir A Lie About My Father. Here, more than in other recent collections, his memories of childhood and connection to his parents creeps in, but one could never say such poems are about childhood, about parents; they are not stand-alone attempts at purgation, but part of the framework of Burnside’s aesthetic, his challenges to the self, the soul, to finding a place in the world.

Recently, Burnside has become renowned for his environmental concerns; his prose work offers some of the best—and most realistic—ideas of how literature and environmental issues meet. Like his previous collections, Gift Songs is populated with plants and animals, with rural landscapes, the sun and rain, and especially the wind in all its forms.  The natural world was what first attracted me towards Burnside’s work, and ‘Five Animals’ in this collection would be a perfect entry point for readers approaching the poet for the first time.

The second half of the book is an ambitious sequence titled ‘Four Quartets’, which focuses on four fishing ports, two in France, one in Scotland and one in Norway.  On first reading the sequence appears only fleetingly comparable to T.S. Eliot’s, finding similar motifs in the elements and declarations of faith, though future closer readings will no doubt reveal more intricate connections.  Burnside is back to the familiar territory of coastline, the boundaries between land, sea and sky, that was the location for his most successful works in The Light Trap and The Good Neighbour:

You see it best from the air:

how salt perpetuates itself, turned from the sea

to whiten the marais salants, graded end sieved

and laid in ice-white drifts beneath the sun

                                                                                    (‘Salt’)

There is an extent to which Burnside has mastered his style and is working and reworking the same ideas from collection to collection.  This can be problematic, for while this solidity in his own aesthetic convictions is one of his great strengths, there feels for most of ‘Four Quartets’ a certain unwillingness to explore new themes.  But then, in the final sequence, ‘Ny-Hellesund’, a new emotion comes in, which changes the feel of the book as a whole, gilding it with a nervous erratic edge: ‘Sometimes the only tool we have/is panic/not what was wanted, perhaps, but something to work with’.  In his essay on American poets cited at the beginning of this review, Burnside wrote that ‘Panic is the fear, not of the unknown, but of the unknowable.  At the same time, it is the inspiration, the dark joy, that comes of the encounter with what cannot be known’.  Gift Songs is a collection that revels in the sense of panic, and understands the simultaneous fear and joy of the unknowable.  It is, in this sense, also an entirely modern collection, speaking directly to our time, asking the big questions with a patience and beauty unique to contemporary poetry:

Whether we pray

to a god, or the weight of an absence,

what matters is the way the story runs

forever,

through the fields of transformation:

terror, a measureless step

on the way to concealment;

concealment, a hidden door

to the currents beyond.    

                                                      (‘Continuum’)