Book description
To the Shakers, a good song was a gift; indeed the test of a song's
goodness was how much of a gift it was. In their call to 'labour to
make the way of God your own', Shaker artists expressed an aesthetic
that had much in common with the old Japanese notion, attributed to
Hokusai, that to paint bamboo, one had first to become bamboo.
In his tenth collection, John Burnside begins with an interrogation
of the gift song, treating matters of faith and connection, the
community of living creatures and the idea of a free church - where
faith is placed, not in dogma or a possible credo, but in the
indefinable - and moves on through explorations of time and place,
towards a tentative and idiosyncratic re-ligere, the beginnings
of a renewal of the connection to, and faith in, an ordered world.
The book closes with a series of meditations on place, entitled
'Four Quartets', intended both as a spiritual response to the string
quartets of Bartók and Britten (as Eliot's were to Beethoven's late
quartets), and as an experiment in the poetic form that the finest of
poets, the true miglior fabbro, chose as a medium for his own
declaration of faith. The poems in this collection are true gifts:
thrillingly beautiful, charged with power and mystery, each imbued
with the generous skills of a master of his craft.
John Burnside's last few books were the critically-acclaimed
collection of short fiction,
Something Like Happy;
the novel,
A Summer of Drowning
, shortlisted for the 2011 Costa Prize; and his poetry collection,
Black Cat Bone
, which won both the 2011 Forward Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize for
Poetry.
