With yesterday’s announcement of John Burnside’s death, I thought of this review that I wrote in 2006 of his Selected Poems, published by Cape Poetry. His work meant a lot to me around that time and I enjoyed the chance to try to articulate what I found fascinating in it.

John Burnside’s poetry has, for some years now, been offering us a modern egotistical sublime. With Wordsworth, he shares a responsive delight in nature and daunting powers of self-analysis; also similarly, he can slip towards the prolix and portentous and there is something of the same difficulty with projection into another’s experience. But Burnside’s work frequently achieves a moving sublimity without loosening its grip on reality. He is the only contemporary poet who consistently demonstrates the power of a poetic form that is something other than mini fictional narrative, raw confessional, or condensed dramatic monologue. That he is also successful in writing prose makes his achievement all the more impressive.

His work was recognised in the early 1990s despite bucking the trends of secularism, formalism, and plain/street language. His poetry’s brooding intensity lacked laddish brouhaha. The palette was never broad – rural twilights, leaf litter, owls hunting, tracks across snow – but his eye was always on the margins of such things, where the human and the natural met and negotiated. It felt like something spiritual was about to be said or had been articulated and just missed. This was twinned with the powerfully felt absence of fixed personal identity that has remained so deeply engrained in his work. In poems that in many ways were hardly radical, it was this element that made Burnside feel modern. In a self-regarding culture ever more attached to the teats of mobility, individuality, celebrity and fashion, his relentless worrying away at the obscurity of the self, his flirting with its non-existence, struck dissonant but resonating chords.

Burnside’s themes are frequently disturbing. But in a poem like ‘Halloween’ (from The Myth of the Twin, published in 1994) his exquisite ability to conjure up the British countryside proves to be an essential part of the pleasure of reading him. As often, the season is autumn – cold, mostly deserted, snow, rain, “the fernwork of ice and water”. The narrator peels bark from a tree to smell “its ghost” in a characteristic movement from the precisely evoked physical to the almost casually implied spiritual. What the figure in the landscape is trying to do is to “define my place”. Even scraping down in the leaf mould, he finds fungal traces that look “like the first elusive threads / of unmade souls”. Nearby village bells provide “nothing” and the poem typically ends with the figure’s sense of “other versions of myself” on the periphery of vision and these can be taken to imply other futures, untaken pasts, other roles familiarly adopted, even selves beyond the physical – the inconclusiveness is the point.

Burnside has pursued experiments with differing perspectives that were first signalled by the opening and closing poems of The Myth of the Twin. For example, though in the end less successful than its predecessor, Swimming in the Flood (1995)dramatically broadened his poetry’s reach to include the experience of others, often in more extended form and in dramatic monologues. Persecutors and victims inhabit these poems and speak disturbingly of abuse and “the inexplicable / malice of being” (‘Schadenfreude’). This was a turning point in Burnside’s development as what now flooded into the poetry was what had lain buried in the delicacy and tentativeness of the earlier work. In the ‘The Old Gods’ he declares their power is strongest “when anger or fear / is fuzzing the surface, / making us dizzy and whole”. The process of uncovering is shown to be one of healing and this selection includes the sequence called ‘Burning a Woman’ which seems nakedly to speak of the poet’s mother and father. Equally, the ‘Parousia’ sequence (not included in this Selected) ends with what appear to be sceptical reflections on his earlier inquisition beyond the merely physical: “All resurrections are local . . ./ the sign I have waited to see / is happening now / and always”. Here Burnside seems to arrive at a sense of secular miracle (a version of Rilke’s “Hiersein ist herrlich”) less concerned with the reality of religious presence than with the individual’s response to its possibility.

And yet, the dramatic monologues proved something of a cul de sac. With his subsequent work, Burnside has returned to his best subject: himself. Partly what makes the award-winning The Asylum Dance such a magnificent achievement is the development of the fluid poetic form he combines with a second person plural address that achieves the universal without being either hectoring or twee. The influence of William Carlos Williams is obvious, but Burnside extends this beyond a fluent impressionism concerned with the truth of things to encompass a philosophical musing, the lines flickering across the page as if viewed through water. This new selection is too brief to achieve the full sense of his development, but one of the marvels of Burnside’s work is its continuing delivery of extraordinary evocations of the natural world that have become gradually melded with an introspective depth that does not merely offer insight, but sustained meditation. The four long sequences from The Asylum Dance are rightly given space here and constitute a masterpiece in which the poems offer up rich, disturbing, beautiful, precise, profound, and sustained experiences undergone in the act of reading, rather than a lesser poetry’s marshalling of moments of insight and feeling. Burnside’s career already provides ample proof of a fascinating and significant artistic development, and this selection will prove a good starting point for anyone not yet following it.