Though John Burnside, prolific poet, fiction writer and memoirist, may be a well-known and well-respected commodity in Great Britain where Black Cat Bone, his twelfth collection, bagged both the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize upon its original publication in 2011, this new edition from Graywolf Press marks the first stateside publication of his poetry. In Black Cat Bone, Burnside’s darkly musical poetry, image-rich and associative, continues to consider life in all its transformational complexity. What Burnside refers to as “a stark momentum” governs the lives of his speakers and informs his poems’ strange blend of unalleviated stoicism and appreciation of provisional pleasures.
Black Cat Bone, filled as it is with metaphysical adumbrations and bitter happenstance, gathers much of its stylistic and thematic momentum from “The Fair Chase,” a long narrative poem written in tercets and coaxing iambs which comprises the book’s entire first section. An elusive poem that contains more than a hint of self-annihilation, “The Fair Chase” offers up the recollection of a young hunter and social outcast who slips away from his hunting party and begins to follow an elusive quarry that’s equal parts phantom beast and personal demon. The sense of deprivation that infuses the collection’s tales of ostracism, disillusionment, and lost love begins here as Burnside outlines the young hunter’s inner conflict with characteristically fine rhetorical shading and selection of imagery:
[. . .] if, on occasion, I never quite saw the point,
I was always the first to arrive, with my father’s gun,
bound to the old ways, lost in a hand-me-down greatcoat
and last among equals – flycatcher, dreamer, dolt,
companion to no one,
alone in a havoc of signs.
Burnside captures the contradictory desires and incomprehension engulfing a young man who feels the pull of tradition and camaraderie but is excluded from partaking in it. The hunting party itself, envisioned as a “wandering column” in which men die and are replaced, also represents the first instance of Burnside’s thematic use of the communal to underscore individual inconsequence, the capriciousness of fate, and the impossibility of lasting communion. In Black Cat Bone change is the only constant, and those with a “mind // that never sleeps, and will not let itself / be gathered to its god” deal with their simmering mortal dread by engaging with ontological questions rather than claiming a false certainty for themselves:
May; and already
it’s autumn: broken gold
and crimson in the medieval
beechwoods, where our shadows come and go,
no darker
than the figures in a book
of changes,
till they’re hexed
and singled out
for something chill and slender in this world,
more sleight-of-hand
than sorrow or safekeeping.
(“On the Fairytale Ending”)
Burnside’s own sleight-of-hand enters into the collection at the level of craft via subtle through lines created by his recycling and recontextualizing of significant words and phrases. Prior deployments of language ghost subsequent ones in Burnside’s world of supersessions with language unifying and obfuscating in equal measure. In nearly every instance, these words and phrases reference threshold states of being: river water “slithers” around fingers; an aging skater, recapturing his former grace, goes “slithering” on ice; people and shadows are “singled out” by indifferent fate; voices and lifeblood are “sifted” from this world; and the aporia of an “everafter” is variously pondered. In Black Cat Bone, new versions of thought and behavior contain subtle yet telling reversions. It’s a technique that suits Burnside’s focus on the provisional and begs further readings from those trying to make a worldview congeal.
A gifted nature poet, Burnside’s natural world is all moving parts whose movements render those parts all the more palpable: “That was a foreign country: snowdrifts, then sand, / blotted and kissed with yew-drupes / and windfall holly.” The verbs “blotted” and “kissed” expertly suggest the pink fleshiness of the yew-drupes, while the comparative rigidity of the holly branches is ingeniously emphasized by changing the noun “windfall” into a modifier. Not showy, but absolutely indelible. Many such moments of incisively economical description dot the landscape of Black Cat Bone, evoking nature’s grandeur without the kind of dull list-making that can turn poets into logorrheic field guides. Burnside creates a sensuous moving present that’s vivid enough to call his speakers’ attention back from their metaphysical preoccupations, which makes his lyrics and narratives feel persuasive rather than diffuse.
This economical and evocative diction also extends to the collection’s focused lyricism. “Everafter,” the collection’s second and strongest section, deals with failed love and self-deception and offers up lyrics full of unique gesture and insight. Perhaps none of these poems rise to the heights of “Notes Towards an Ending,” a poem in which a failed marriage creates a domestic reliquary for the jilted party:
No more conversations.
No more wedlock.
No more vein of perfume in a scarf
I haven’t worn for months, her voice come back
to haunt me, and the Hundertwasser sky
Magnificat to how a jilted heart
refuses what it once mistook for mercy.
It’s never what we wanted, everafter;
we asked for something else, a lifelong Reich
of unexpected gifts and dolce vita,
peach-blossom smudging the glass and a seasoned
glimmer of the old days in this house
The entangling rhyme and rhetoric of this lover’s lament exudes the warmth and recognizable humanity at the core of Burnside’s vision. Whether it’s the image of the boy in the poem “Disappointment” standing waist deep in the river with “a burr of water streaming through his hands / in silt italics,” or the wistful speaker in “Loved and Lost” concluding “that love divulged is barely love at all: / only the slow decay of a second skin // concocted from the tinnitus of longing,” there are lyrics in Black Cat Bone that stun.
Where the collection flounders a bit is in its eponymous third section, where pliant persona hardens into character, and engagingly human dramas turns into something closer to genre exercise. Drawing on folklore and murder ballads, the sequence follows an obsessive lover with a god complex, who plays the deluded counterpart to the comparatively stoical personae in the rest of the collection. One of the sequence’s most over the top moments comes when this seventh son of a seventh son kills his lover in “Down by the River,” a poem whose first lines rival those of Frank Bidart’s “Herbert White” in subtlety: “She dies in a local flurry of dismay / as kittens do, held steady in a pail / of icy water.” To be sure, there are still some wonderful lines and individual poems in this section, but squaring its tendency toward Grand Guignol with the rest of the collection left me scratching my head.
Though providence frustratingly fails to reveal itself directly to the speakers in Black Cat Bone, a measure of solace gleaned from experience settles over the poems of the book’s fourth and final section, “Faith.” A new receptivity to the consolation offered by brief moments of “thoughtless grace” and glimpses of the sublime emerges. In the beautiful ekphrastic, “Pieter Brueghel: Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap, 1565,” the frozen river fills with skaters who shed their personal griefs in communal activity and are briefly able “to glide free / in the very eye of heaven.” A similar freedom is granted to the speaker in the poem “Amnesia,” when he forgets his own desires and finds the sublime hovering before him:
It never lasts;
but for a while,
at least,
I forget
what I wanted to see
from my kitchen door
and watch the new snow
falling in the yard,
The poetry of Burnside’s Black Cat Bone is a strikingly original composite of sound and sense. Trying to distill its slippery essence into prose is like trying to adapt Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” into a self-help manual. As A.E. Housman once said, “Poetry is not the thing said but a way of saying it,” and the unique timbre created by Burnside’s ingenious prosody and obsessive imagination make for poetry of a very high order.
