12 - John Burnside: Poetry as the Space of Withdrawal

Summary

John Burnside has remarked that ‘[o]ur response to the world is essentially one of wonder’, and his approach to the mysteries of the natural world is distinguished by a blend of awed fascination, forensic scrutiny and a complex sense of obligation. His explicit concern with ecology is well established, and is exemplified by the anthology Wild Reckoning, co-edited with Maurice Riordan, which celebrated the fortieth anniversary of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Burnside's ecological preoccupations are fundamental to his work, yet his poetry, and increasingly his fiction, at once resists and surrenders itself to the fleeting, intangible yet transforming encounter with a wilderness indifferent to human intrusion, or with the liminal but potent waste grounds of suburbia. His writing has exhibited a deepening preoccupation with the ethics of withdrawal, and how this might be reconciled with responsibilities to family, to human and non-human others, and to the environment. The relinquishing of any damaging, proprietorial relation to the natural world may acknowledge human limitation, which Christopher Manes argues is the first step ‘in our attempt to re-establish communication with nature’, but, in Burnside's poetry, the momentary, uncertain opening-out of the lyric experience is at once an act of welcome and an act of exposure or intrusion. The poem has a footprint; it cannot help but mark out territory, cannot remain in its contemplative darkness. Donald Worster has claimed that ‘[w]e are facing a global crisis today, not because of how ecosystems function but rather because of how our ethical systems function’. This chapter will examine the challenge faced by the modern poet who attempts to think the natural world ethically and ‘relationally’ through the singularity of a lyric mode whose nature has characteristically been conceived as one of detachment and self-absorption.

From the outset, Burnside's poetry has sought to forge a ‘kinship with the dark’ that at once lies beyond and within the house, hedge or fence: the wolf lurks inside, the domestic interior its ‘domain’. ‘Suburbs’, a series of prose poems in Common Knowledge (1991), meditates on threshold space in which an abandoned railway station is ‘already half-surrendered to the woods’, exposed to a form of greenness that is beautiful and dangerous.