We Are Blessed by the Dead: Remembering John Burnside

Essays in the “Remembrances” series pay tribute to poets who have died in the past year.

It was 1990, and I was editorial director at the publisher Secker & Warburg in London. I didn’t know it then, but we were entering the last 15 years of interesting non-conglomerate publishing in Britain. Nor did I know that I would shortly encounter a writer I would work with over the next 35 years, on 30 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.

We had just moved from Soho to the Michelin Building in South Kensington and I was planning a relaunch of the poetry list, with new books by Sharon Olds and Michael Longley and a couple of debuts. That spring, I’d been sent the manuscript of Common Knowledge, a collection of poems that astonished me and that I wanted us to publish. I’d never heard of the author, John Burnside, so I asked if he’d meet for lunch to talk it through. There was a fresh, finely cadenced feel to the work, and a strangeness—a combination of evanescence and ancient truth that stayed with me:

Signal Stop, near Horsley

Smoke in the woods
like someone walking in a silent film
beside the tracks.

A shape I recognise—not smoke, or not just smoke,
and not just snow on hazels
or fox-trails from the platform to the trees,

but winter, neither friend
nor stranger, like the girl I sometimes glimpse

at daybreak near the crossing, in a dress
of sleet and berries, gazing at the train.

We met in a brasserie across from our offices. John traveled up on the train from where he lived in Surrey, a grim suburb between Guildford and Dorking. He worked in computers, of all things, as a systems analyst, which probably accounted for his terrible suit and cheap attaché case. He told me his story and we hit it off immediately. I think we became friends that lunchtime—friends for life. Common Knowledge was published the following spring.

We were near exact contemporaries, both born in 1955, and his geography was not dissimilar to mine. And yet, our backgrounds were radically different. I was a son of the manse, my father the university chaplain at Aberdeen on the northeast coast of Scotland. John was born in Dunfermline, Fife, on the southeast coast, and raised in nearby Cowdenbeath, where his father worked in the coal mines,  and the family lived in a prefab surrounded by overgrown gardens and haunted woods. His father was a foundling, a “throwaway” discovered on a doorstep during the General Strike of 1926, and was passed from one temporary home to another. He emerged a typical Scottish hard man: a fantasist; a turbulent and controlling alcoholic. John said his father’s only gift was that he was a wonderful liar.

John was brought up in a house that was not just full of simmering violence, but where truth was always in doubt—so he was suspicious of it. The family moved to Corby, Northamptonshire, where there was gang-fighting and industrial squalor, but also a steel-plant—where his father could find work—and many bars, where he eventually found his death.

John often revisited his poor Catholic childhood, shadowed by poverty and violence, in work that is also lit by his fascination with the natural world. He wrote vividly about those early years in his poems, his novel Living Nowhere (2003), and his three extraordinary books of memoir: A Lie About My Father (2006), Waking Up in Toytown (2010), and I Put a Spell on You (2014).

In the 34 years I knew and worked with John, I was bewildered by his fluid imagination, his range and curiosity, his creative gifts, his generous heart and endless contradictions. He resented the imposed empiricism of being offered only five senses, when he felt there were more. John held imagination as his one most crucial tool—or weapon—in the struggle for art, for settlement, beauty and grace, in the search for a glimpse of glamourie. This Scots word, glamourie, Anglicized to “glamour,” means a fleeting enchantment, or magic. I think John was drawn to that notion of a conjured charm or presence that came from the spirit-world, and he watched for it constantly, that liminal light. He told me once that poetry was, for him, a form of alchemy.

His work was both intimately personal and universal, often moving through stages of vulnerability, turbulence, terror, and desire, to artistic positions that were sensitive and highly alert. He risked everything for his art and its integrity, in order to arrive at a new and original understanding of beauty and truth, and offer a better angle from which to view the world, through nature, myth, and magic. For him, every poem was a transformation, a metamorphosis, a transfiguration.

I was amazed when he told me how he wrote poems: in his head—or “on the lips,” as Mandelstam put it—while out walking. He let them stay in his head, marinating, and could carry a long section of a poem there for days, while it was still warm and malleable, until it was ready to appear. When he finally transcribed the poem to paper it had settled into a kind of music. Perhaps because of this, his work never felt forced, or fussed over, but felt as mysterious and natural as breathing.

In 2023, John received the David Cohen Prize for lifetime achievement in literature—previously won by writers of the stature of V.S. Naipaul, Harold Pinter, Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing, and Seamus Heaney. I had the sense that John felt he had done what he had set out to do. This person who had, as a child, wanted to disappear, to be “living nowhere” spent the last years of his life devoted to the idea of “dwelling places,” of settlement and of grace. John had a sense that his work as a writer—of all forms, and in its totality—had been properly recognized. While he was still writing as much as ever, I believe John had reached a place of acceptance and completion, perhaps even peace, having said “some words to the close and holy darkness” as Dylan Thomas has it, on the other side of sleep.

John’s posthumous collection, The Empire of Forgetting—the 30th book of our friendship—will be published in August. These two poems show a talent undimmed; a haunted, haunting sensibility that conjures the old gods from the land:

October 2023

First hard frost. The old gods gone to ground
in drystane walls and silted
ditchworks, sleet 
in squalls along the ridge, 
then nothing: silence; 
grey on grey on grey. 
I walk out to the far edge of the yard
and stare into the distance, almost 
sure that I am seen 
by all I know is there 
and cannot see:
echoed, in a line of stunted gorse
along the hedge-line; noticed, then dismissed
as not quite animal enough 
to hunt, or fear. 
No gods to speak of 
here, but there are
phantoms from an early travelogue
who visit now and then; laying no claim
to worship, they are 
kindred to the birds 
in field guides: tender, indisputable, 
and apparitions all, though they are blessed
as I am, when the first sun filters through
the windbreak, and, in spite of all I know, 
the light comes clear
and everything is true.

Since the moment I heard the news of his death last year, these lines from John’s third memoir, I Put a Spell on You, have rung in my head like a bell:

It might sound sentimental to say it, but we are blessed by the dead, and we know that we are, in spite of our protestations to the contrary. They leave spaces in our lives that, for some of us, are the closest thing to sacred we ever know. They are there and then they are gone and, after a time, we come to see a certain elegance in that—the elegance of a magic trick, say, where the conjurer rehearses the vanishing act that we must all accomplish sooner or later.

After his memorial service in October, standing at the edge of the North Sea, looking out over the ruins of St Andrews castle, I watched the waves building as the night came down. Drawing, darkening, breaking into white.