John Burnside – All One Breath

Full Disclosure: Last time Burnside had a book out I reviewed it and hated it.

Review: If you liked Black Cat Bone, you’ll like All One Breath. The new collection begins with a series called ‘Self Portrait as Funhouse Mirror’, and if you thought that might portend something ludic you mightn’t’ve read Burnside before. In the opening poem, ‘Hall of Mirrors’ the child poet sees himself, ‘baby-faced / pariah; little / criminal’, before realising, ‘The backrooms of the heart are Babylon / incarnate, miles of verdigris and tallow and the cries / of hunting birds, unhooded for a kill // that never comes. / I saw that, when I saw this otherself’. The child then joins (or thinks he joins) his mother in seeing ‘what I was / beyond the child she loved, the male / homunculus she’d hoped I’d never find / to make me like my father […] a blear / of Eden from that distance in the glass […] that’s never ours alone, / including us, till everything / is choir.’ The poem rests on both presenting the story through the child’s eyes and explicitly investing the child with the understanding the poem presents. That choir image is reprised in the closing poem, ‘Choir’, but strangely tells the story of how the young poet didn’t participate in said choir. ‘Everything / is choir’ except himself; this is a neat encapsulation of the problems I have with the book.

‘Hall of Mirrors’ is easily the best poem in the collection, which might be why it’s at the front of the book and will likely be quoted at length in the breathless Guardian review when Burnside wins again. It has many of the poet’s signature features: self-reflection both literal and conceptual, nature as pathetic fallacy, other humans as pathetic fallacy (‘her face was all / reflection’), ‘dusk’ as indicator of liminal space, an ending that elides all semantic responsibility by literally/grammatically qualifying itself out of reasonable accountability. To that end, if you were to wordcloud All One Breath ‘almost’ would probably loom large, alongside ‘half’. It’s totally reasonable to describe an experience as ‘half-imagined’, but doing it twice in the same collection (‘such fauna as I only half-imagine / are ghosts out of Bewick’, ‘I felt [the dead goldfinch’s] mercy, / something only half- / imagined’, not to mention ‘I half-believed / that nothing would be there’) speaks to a narrowness of imaginative range, the poet as primary custodian of common sense and meaning. In the poem ‘Erosion’, for example, the poet looks on in scorn at his countryside neighbour rounding up sheep with a quad bike: ‘Soon he’ll have turbines up; he’ll buy out / my better neighbours, building, field by field, / his proud catastrophe / of tin and mud. / I loathe him, but it’s nothing personal […] and yet not enough in him / of worth or life / to qualify as foe’. It’s unedifying stuff, placing the poet’s own ‘wind-slender / kinship of sea and blood / and the kinship of the earth / with everything that crawls beneath the stars’ directly in contrast with his renewable energy-loving (how dare he) neighbour. The poem suffers from a logical disconnect: nature is presented as mysteriously bestowing kinship on man (via ‘sea and blood’), but it is within the poet’s remit to refuse this same kinship to his fellow. Where does the poet really believe the kin-making power lies?

There’s little escaping the sense that the ecological in All One Breath is yoked to the semantic plough. Nature does not appear in its own right (see Michael Longley, Edward Thomas, or for a more recent example Jen Hadfield), but as background colour for the performing poetic self. There are plenty of kittiwakes and larks and sparrows, but the poems in which natural life is given individual focus are ‘An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, 1768’, which focuses not just on the bird’s suffering but the fear it causes in young women, and ‘Instructions for a Sky Burial’, in which a coyote’s rotten head gives rise to the poet’s wish to be disposed of similarly, ‘unwashed and naked […] where the crows / can find me’, giving back to his imagined corpse the centre stage. It’s telling that on both occasions the studied animal no longer has living agency, unable to supersede the needs of the observing self.

This habit has a particularly uncomfortable effect on the collection’s several elegies. In ‘The Day Etta Died’, for the singer-songwriter Etta James, we first watch the poet ‘marking a stack of essays / on Frank O’Hara // and each had a Wiki- / paragraph to say // who Genet was, and who / was Billie Holiday’. His students do not have the same cultural references as the poet, and are thus condemned; how does this increase our understanding of the life and importance of the singer? ‘Nocturne: Christmas, 2012’, i.m. Dennis O’Driscoll, begins ‘When I heard you had died, I went out into the yard / and stood a while, like something that belonged / to darkness’ and ends ‘[that Christmas Eve] the headlamps snagged on a ewe, in the first wet snow / and I stopped, by the side of the road, / to untangle the wire.’ Again, the elegy’s power to revitalise and restore is elided in favour of self-presentation, and a few gestures towards ‘We all need a second life’, ‘Say what you will, all making is nostalgia,’ leave only a passing, passive impression of the man elegised. Witness also the weird power dynamics in ‘The End’, in which ‘Strangers are making love / in my grandmother’s house / forty years after she died,’ and the poet wishes to address the new man of the house (the woman is off doing woman things, presumably), ‘If I could, I would tell him / a story I heard long ago […] It’s a story he doesn’t know, but halfway through / he sees that it has to end / in the safety of fog’, the unknown man becoming an extension of the poet’s authority.

Tl; dr: All One Breath is not a ‘bad book’. It’s perfectly competently put together, the lines flow and there’s plenty of dark darkness to make it sound like some deep emotion is being played out. But what this collection and The Dark Knight Rises have in common is mistaking that darkness for emotional complexity, for a challenging philosophical stance. Dude writers have been brooding over dead things for quite some time, and this isn’t breaking any new ground; it’s the book’s sheer conventionality, the artistic conservatism that pushes me away. That’s without addressing the whiff of misogyny that appears any time a woman is subject to the poem’s eye, or the epigraph addiction, the near-identical register and rhythmic similarities of each poem. In short, All One Breath is not an enlightening book, and there are a great many poets more deserving of your attention.

John Burnside – Black Cat Bone

The Forward Prize has gone to John Burnside, nominated three times before without winning. Too bad. I don’t think it’s a particularly strong field they’ve chosen, particularly when Alan Gillis has been overlooked for both of the major awards, which is nothing short of criminal. Nurske I haven’t been able to get my hands on, O’Brien and Hill were blow-outs for different reasons, and Longley’s book, while not his best, is still a damned sight better than Black Cat Bone. Longley’s book has warmth, humour, still one of the finest ears in the business, and goddammit he says things about things. I miss that.

The book has been praised for, amongst other things, being ‘liminal’, exploring the state between waking and sleeping, which is appropriate because that’s precisely where reading the forsaken thing put me. ICE BURN. There’s only so often you can tell me about the snow, the drifting snow, the miles-deep snow… The physical presences are usually mere shadows, there’s a veritable menagerie of dead animals that pile up through the book, and the only humans that pop in are so ill-drawn and bloodless as to question the good of their presence.

The book goes to disappointing lengths to keep the reader at bay from any kind of insight into what in god’s name he’s talking about. There are several epigrams, most in foreign languages without an English crib; in a bygone age these would have been chaff-sorting shibboleths, keys cut only for the bescholared few to gain entry into the back rooms of enlightenment, but glory be to google translate which gave me the sullen truth that if there was some glimmer of profundity in the originals it’s passed safely over the head of the poem that follows.

They feel like so much window-dressing and add to the pervasive air of ‘up yours for trying to read me, you vulgate’ that surrounds the book like a huff. There are a number of poems that use Bible verses as epigrams – one includes an English translation, one a latin translation, and two only the chapter and verse reference. Why not include the passages in the notes in the back of the book if it so sullies the appearance of the page? Can’t he see we just want to understand??

Of course these are peripheral frustrations with an airy and unfocused book from an author, who, while clearly well-read (he gives us no chance to believe anything to the contrary), does not appear to have absorbed the lessons of Kafka, Stevens and Melville, particularly not the comic timing of any of those three. Say what you will about Stevens’ dryness or coldness, at least he had a rakish angle to his chapeau. Burnside… I don’t even know where he fits into that metaphor. I’d wager his chapeau is barely at an angle at all.

Okay, look, Burnside displays some competence with narrative and atmosphere in his long-form poems. “The Fair Chase” is a short story dressed as a poem, but as a piece of writing it is an effective one, even if any argument it makes is inferred. He can certainly string an unusual sentence together, and does not shy away from the darker elements of his dreamlife. Whatever you might say about the frustrating lack of emotion, death is constantly a presence.

Some examples then to illustrate my consternation, then. Here’s a cracker, from the poem “A Game of Marbles”: ‘The things I love / I bury in the woods / to keep them safe’. That’s nice dear. Try to picture what Burnside is describing here, in “Amnesia”: ‘where a man / is almost there / raising his hand / to wave, / or turning back, / precise / and random / like an early film / and pausing / in the snow, / as if to listen –’ That’s the essence of the shit Taylor Mali is calling out in this video. From “Faith”: ‘not him, not her, but something of the two combined.’ Who him and her are is completely down to the reader’s imagination because god knows the poet’s not telling. I choose Peter Falk and Fiona Bruce. Now there’s an image.

The padding that fills out the book is all the usual cream-filled humbug that people make fun of when they say they don’t like poetry, and they need only point to the consistent lack of emotional engagement with the world conjured up to be fully justified. From “Nativity”, a poem in which the speaker’s mother dies in childbirth: ‘the warmth of my mother / fading, as the lights go out // in house after house, from here / to the edge of the world, // her slack mouth, then the darkness in her eyes / the first thing I see / when the midwife returns with a candle.’ There’s a coldness to the whole poem, ending in close-up, it doesn’t suggest a steely sadness, just an apathy that reminds me of our friend RR. It’s unfair to expect a reader to invest emotion into a work that brings none of its own.

As for the albatross of scholarship that so clearly encumbers Burnside’s writing, it saps the poems’ personality and feels like the product of almost any undergraduate who had read Frost and gotten sick of all the friendliness. Maybe that’s unfair. There are some words in here that undergraduates might not know, like ‘vellum’. There’s also a grim-faced shoulder-to-the-grindstone dedication that certainly I didn’t bother my arse with in my bachelor days.

Speaking of Peter Falk, just one more thing. Burnside, while not quite in the same league of objectifying maverick Robin Robertson, still has a fair dig at portraying women as interchangeable and merely the sum of their physical attributes. From a little passage of poems whose titles seem taken from or imitations of blues songs: “Death Room Blues”, “Hurts Me Too”, “Oh No Not My Baby” etc. ‘my mouth / a sweet spot in the dark // she thinks is safe / until I drink her in’. Sound familiar? ‘that tomboy sweetness in her face / of one struck dumb with awe.’ ‘at the end, / she scattered from my hands, no longer hurt / so beautifully, she seemed more song than woman.’ These are characters with their humanity dampened and this is a narrator with unchallenged power over its subjects. His women are silent, controlled, and lifeless. These several poems are a particular struggle.

Judging by the chatter Burnside has picked up the Forward Prize largely off the back of his failed nominations in the past, very  likely for better efforts. This automatically puts him deep in the running for the TS Eliot, and undeservingly so. Leontia Flynn still stands as the one to beat, but once I get my mitts on the rest I’ll have a much better idea of how upset I’ll be when she doesn’t win.