Annie Fisher reviews Ruin, Blossom by John Burnside (Cape, 2024)
Ruin, Blossom is John Burnside’s seventeenth poetry collection. On top of that he’s produced novels, memoirs, essays, and an impressive history of twentieth century poetry. He’s received numerous accolades, and in 2023 was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime’s achievement in literature (a prize whose illustrious back catalogue includes Harold Pinter, Doris Lessing and Seamus Heaney). In the face of all that, I can’t help feeling daunted when it comes to reviewing his work, but I love the music of his writing – especially the poetry – so here goes!
The collection takes its title from Schiller: Neues Leben blüht aus den Ruinen (new life blooms from the ruins), and the book’s cover shows a small skull (it could be a child’s) with a pink blossom in one of the eye sockets. The poems address mortality, but there’s hope too, despite personal and planetary loss. As with Burnside’s previous collection, Learning to Sleep (Penguin, 2021), these poems are influenced by a near-death experience which Burnside has spoken about on Radio 4. The event was more akin to a drug trip than a religious experience. It left him with a conviction that death is not to be feared, and that his dying, whenever it happens, will be less an individual event, more a part of a larger, cosmic process.
The poems address mortality, but there’s hope too, despite personal and planetary loss
The book is in three sections, ‘Apostacy’, ‘Asylum’ and ‘Blossom’. In the first of these, ‘Apostacy’, Burnside remembers his Catholic boyhood, declaring himself an unbeliever who has found peace in the state of unknowing. Free of doctrine, free of God, and free of any thought of an afterlife, he’s content to be “pilgrim again, beyond all destination”. This first set of poems (previously published in pamphlet form) was reviewed here by Rory Waterman.
The poem ‘Midnight Mass’, describes a boy “convinced of nothing / least of all the saints”. Nonetheless, symbols and images from Catholicism, together with the language of bible, prayer and liturgy, have shaped his poetry significantly. Religious epigraphs and allusions abound, and there’s something almost wistful in his recollections of an abandoned faith. In the poem, ‘Apostacy’:
At one time,
when there might have been a God,
the side-streets vaguely
convent, gospel
whispered down the galleries
of rain
That word “whispered” hints at ‘wistful’ to my ear. Religious language and imagery are integral to how the poet sees the world, particularly the natural world. This is the beginning and end of ‘Nativity’:
A spill of yew
like Christ’s blood
in the snow
[…]
a flock of redwings
flitting through the fog,
woodrush
and fescue,
wintergreen,
Rose of Sharon.
It’s a beautiful piece, and a striking example of what I think of as secular sacredness, something that runs through the work. He chooses such a lovely litany of plant names, including “Rose of Sharon”, a reference to the Song of Solomon and one of the many titles given to the Virgin Mary in Catholic tradition.
Words drawn from the natural world are part of the beauty and music of Burnside’s poetry. Here are just a few more to be found in this collection: “alpenglow”, “greenwood”, “willowherb”, “honeydew”, “aconite”, “whimbrel”. And “snow” of course. You can’t read more than three or four John Burnside poems without coming across snow!
Words drawn from the natural world are part of the beauty and music of Burnside’s poetry
The second group of poems, ‘Asylum’, is dominated by ‘Bedlam Variations’, a sequence of ten unrhymed sonnets which probably draw on the time Burnside spent in a mental hospital suffering from psychosis. The limitation and containment of the sonnet form feels appropriate to a physically walled-in situation and an isolated mental state. The sonnets seem to represent shifting moods – some strange and confused, some deeply disturbed, some peaceful, even happy. There are wild animals and the ghosts of the dead, but there are angels too. This is from the first sonnet:
At noon, the cats go hunting in the park,
a fitful Angelus of shrieks and whines:
pinpoints of blood in the gravel, clutches of fur
And in the fourth sonnet:
something is with us, here,
in the blue of dawn,
a face between dog and wolf
on the day-room wall
By contrast, the second sonnet presents a much calmer state of mind:
Alone on the ward, I leave the windows
open, so the bees can come and go,
and turn back to my Boys Own Book of Birds,
saying the words aloud to keep them true,
till, word by word, with ruin in my head,
I fold into the light and I am blossom.
The final section in the book, ‘Blossom’, presents poems of grief, regret, and loss, including poems about a lost love and a lost brother who recurs as an idealised, more integrated version of himself. But for all this, Burnside seems more at peace with himself these days. In ‘Poem on a Line by Adam Zagajewski’, written in lockdown, the layout of the lines creates a spacious, ruminative ease, where all that matters is each moment as it arises:
no good
reason to be here
at all
other than here
as such
where all we know
is weather
and the slow purl of the heart
itinerant
but touched
with splendour
Burnside has been through a lot in his life, including the near loss of it, but he seems to have found a way to keep his demons quiet. This is the beginning and end of ‘Recusant’:
If anyone should ask, say I was born
in peacetime, when the roads were bright with frost
[…]
I never feed the dogs. They make
their own way, since their gift
is ravening.
But later, when the sky is full of stars,
I go outside,
and know that I am loved.
And in the final poem, ‘A Postscript, for P’ang Yun’, we find Burnside in full Zen mode:
Drawing water, listening for rain;
or splitting wood at first light in the yard:
the smell of resin, snowmelt in the gravel,
the axe-blade disappearing through the grain.
That last line’s elegiac iambic pentameter is typical Burnside – it’s his core rhythm and another reason, along with the word choices mentioned earlier, why his writing sounds classically, timelessly musical. (He composes his poems in his head, often when walking.)
The shadowy themes that have always haunted his writing persist in this collection – death, the damaged world, what might have been. But he has, as he says in the poem ‘Prayer’, become “skilled at mourning”. There are no very long poems and although Burnside is never an ‘easy’ read, none struck me as elusive. The image I take away with me is the gleam of a well-honed axe-blade cleaving wood.
Annie Fisher‘s background is in primary education, initially as a teacher and later as an English adviser. Now semi-retired she writes poetry for both adults and children and sometimes works as a storyteller in schools. She has had two pamphlets published with HappenStance Press: Infinite in all Perfections (2016) and The Deal (2020). She is a member of Fire River Poets, Taunton.
