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
rhythm rhythms seems words
What makes me write is the rhythm of the world around me - the rhythms of the language, of course, but also of the land, the wind, the sky, other lives. Before the words comes the rhythm - that seems to me to be of the essence.
animal covering essential great life lives living stop wave
What is essential - the one thing that could stop us being coarsened to other lives - is that we feel a great, living wave of animal life all around us, covering the earth.
mining town weary
Snow isn't just pretty. It also cleanses our world and our senses, not just of the soot and grime of a Fife mining town but also of a kind of weary familiarity, a taken-for-granted quality to which our eyes are all too susceptible.
defining itself known knows lose musically presence primary species
For a bird, especially for the more musically inventive, song is the defining characteristic, the primary way by which it knows itself and is known by others. To lose its species song is to lose not just its identity but some part of its presence in the world.
abundance air chance clean existence filling life living mass meadows repeated require rivers steady truth
This is a truth that should be repeated like a mantra: to have any chance of a ful - filling life, we require not only clean air and a steady climate, but also an abundance of meadows and woodlands, rivers and oceans, teeming with life and the mass existence of other living creatures.
anyone elegant hawk stopped
Anyone who has ever stopped to watch a hawk in flight will know that this is one of the natural world's most elegant phenomena.
time
It's important to have quiet time and isolation.
human time
Once upon a time, forests were repositories of magic for the human race.
collapse common continued human insects knowledge less population
It is common knowledge now that we depend on insects for our continued existence; that, without key pollinators, the human population would collapse in less than a decade.
areas electricity enormous gas projects
Worldwide, enormous areas of peatland are still being lost to agricultural development, drainage schemes, overgrazing, and exploitation-based infrastructure development projects such as roads, electricity pylons, telephone masts and gas pipelines.
century disappoint forests great landscapes rivers
I know that the only reason American landscapes sometimes disappoint me is that, just a century before I was born, the great rivers and prairies and wild forests still existed. And they were sublime.
deny man warmth
A man was defined, in my father's circles, by what he could bear, the pain he could shrug off, the warmth or comfort he could deny himself.
europe northern seems time
Andoya is in a different world, set at the northern edge of Europe in what seems to be a time and weather of its own.
consumed felt
As a child, I was consumed with a near-obsessive curiosity about what the world felt like for other creatures.