John Burnside
John Burnside
John Burnsideis a Scottish writer, born in Dunfermline. He is one of only two poetsto have won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the same book...
NationalityScottish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth19 March 1955
area asylum home moved response scotland written
'The Asylum Dance' was written after I'd moved back to Scotland and was a response to moving to my old home area of Fife.
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The Botanischer Garten in Berlin has one of Europe's finer winter trails, leading in careful order from glasshouses devoted to African-American and Australian desert species, through a fine collection of tropical plants, and on to the orchid house.
danger entered might offered wild wisdom
The woods were a boon; all too often, the forest offered danger and mystery. Yet it could be liberating. If you entered that wild place on its own terms, you might be accorded wisdom.
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I don't want to suggest that matrimony was necessarily a tragic affair - some of our neighbours' marriages seemed quite functional, if somewhat routine; nevertheless, in the workaday world, it is wedlock that is most likely to offer the occasion for life-threatening disappointment.
finest offers robin
My editor, Robin Robertson, is one of this country's finest poets, so I listen to him when he offers advice.
avenue burns coal felt local version
For a boy of ten, used to the coal bings and rust-coloured burns of Cowdenbeath, the fields and woodland of Kingswood, with its overgrown but stately avenue of copper-barked sequoias, felt like a local version of paradise.
painted
Many of the birds Audubon painted are now extinct, and still we go on killing them, more or less casually, with our pesticides and wires and machinery.
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It takes a true encounter to realise that real animals, wild animals, have all but passed from our lives.
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High Alpine meadows, like their near relatives prairie, desert and certain varieties of wetland, teach us to consider the world from a fresh perspective, to open our eyes and take account of what we have missed, reminding us that, in spite of our emphasis on the visual in everyday speech, we see so very little of the world.
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The great pleasure that comes from reading poets such as Mark Doty and Marianne Moore is the realisation that the essential virtues - compassion, wonder, humility, respect for the mysterious - are far from conventionally heroic.
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'The Gardener' is more than a marvellous collection of images by a master photographer.
announcing found
One day I was talking about what I was going to do next, and just found myself announcing it: 'I'm going to write a book about my father.'
incredibly interests
Irrationality interests me more than anything: sometimes it's very dangerous, but it can be incredibly beautiful.
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A modern arboretum brings us that ancient forest and, with it, a changed apprehension of time, a renewed appreciation of the elegance of natural form and a renewed sense of wonder at the variety of the world we inhabit.