April Warman reviews Gift Songs by John Burnside

To judge by Gift Songs, his tenth collection, John Burnside has ambitions towards philosophical, even theological, poetry. This is signalled explicitly through the titles to some of the sequences that make up the book: ‘Responses to Augustine of Hippo’, ‘Varieties of Religious Experience’, and, most daringly, ‘Four Quartets’. Within the poetry, such ambition can come across rather crudely, as the drive to philosophical formulation swamps the verse’s subtleties: the collection shows an appealing fascination with colours, as abstract qualities: ‘aconite; meltwater; cinnabar; Prussian blue’, ‘cadmium yellow … damson blue ad infinitum’. It is a disappointment when the reasoning behind this suggestive intensity of attraction is flatly spelled out in ‘Retractationes’: ‘as if those colours were those perfect forms / he always wanted: blithe Platonic blues / and reds, not the accidents of light’.

The ambition seems more achieved, more constructive than congestive, in places where the urge to definition and proposition is combined with Burnside’s gift for the fluidly evocative image or idea. ‘Nocturne’ retains the desire to make fine, even abstruse, distinctions, in such lines as ‘and something, not quite light, but like // a narrative of light’, but the concept of a ‘narrative of light’ is not just recherché, but also poetically suggestive. The poem’s drive to haziness and nebulosity, which it shares with many others in the collection, is dramatically grounded in its evocation of gradually fading light: ‘the last mauve of the evening / burning out // along the horizon: nightfall; endlessness.’

Such evocative, almost wistful, language is also seen in ‘De Libero Arbitrio’, which begins,

        – something that comes
from the dark
        (not
self or not-self)

but something between the two
       like the shimmering line
where one form defines another
       yet fails to end;

The sinuous, dreamily interminable syntax provides a perfect analogue for the indeterminacy of what is evoked; the front flap tells us that the book aims to place faith ‘in the indefinable’, and this poetry certainly works toward such a state of unknowing. Read sympathetically, it could be seen as bravely, yet humbly, refusing certainties in favour of an exploration of the limits of the knowable.

However, Burnside’s attraction to the indefinable frustrates at least as often as it appeals: it can leave the reader aching for substance. Later in the poem, we are asked to imagine ‘the shapes we mistake/ for ourselves’ as ‘turning a moment / then slipping away to a depth / that never existed’. To say that a ‘shape’, the only definition of which we are given is explicitly ‘mistaken’, disappears into a place that, the enjambement cruelly announces, doesn’t actually exist, leaves the reader floundering in the wake of an image that, rather than creating meaning, appears to have swallowed itself. Such rug-pulling manoeuvres abound in the collection: ‘something I lost / returned in another form, and was barely remembered’; ‘something else // that looks like you, or would, if you were there’.

An announced suspicion of language in ‘Peninsula’ may be intended to provide justification for this tortuous lack of reference: ‘I know what it is we are losing, moment by moment / in how the names perpetuate the myth / of all they have replaced’, but the explicit exposition of this theory does not ameliorate its effects on the reading experience. Along with another repeated device, definition by negation (‘not / self or not-self’), the poems’ constant evasion of statement is as likely to create distrust and weariness as acceptance of the transcendent limits of language and awareness. In reading poetry, we expect to have to deal with ‘the names’, rather than ‘all they have replaced’: this is, in fact, where much of its pleasure lies. Ninety-three closely printed pages experimenting with indefiniteness as a substitute for such linguistic displacement, ask a lot of a reader.

As can be seen in many places above, Burnside’s skill in holding a line can do a great deal to rescue the vacuity of his content. A single couplet from the last poem of the book shows a beautifully controlled density of sound-patterning that is a gift in itself:

Though nothing I see is ever seen enough,
nothing is heard for certain, even the rain

With such unobtrusive chiasmus (noth/see/seen/nough), with the assonance of ‘heard’ and ‘certain’, and the predominance of ‘n’ sounds, gently echoing the negations expressed, it hardly matters that here is, yet again, a discussion of things not as they are, but as they are not.

But even this skilfulness can become tiresome. The last stanza of ‘The Body as Metaphor’ displays Burnside’s usual supple syntax, working properly in tension with the pentameter that, openly or disguised by odd line-breaks, is the basic unit underlying much of his work:

or something not quite visible, but quick
as birchseed, or the threading of a wire
through sleep and rapture, gathering the hand
that reaches for the light, to close, or open.

Here, however, the suppleness seems automatic, and the pentameter is not strong enough to prevent the phrases clotting into a monotonous succession of two-stress units: ‘the thréading of a wíre / through sléep and rápture / gáthering the hánd / that réaches for the líght / to clóse or ópen.’
           
Burnside’s embrace of unknowing, his serious attempt to address in poetry fundamental philosophical and theological concerns, is a welcome contrast to the shallow kinds of knowingness displayed by much poetry that appears, and is fêted, today. But there is a danger that his work prioritises such content (appearing generally as a conspicuous withholding of content) to the extent that it loses sight of its responsibilities to its readers; and of its status as poetry, which, if wise, will stimulate, please or provoke, before it attempts to instruct.

Gift Songs, Jonathan Cape, 80pp, £9.00, 978-0224079976

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.