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casparb's review against another edition
That is, naturally, Johnmet. This comes with later (perhaps just more recent) John which I think forces us to look at it along some sliding scale of accessibility, that later=popular=easier. All One Breath is one of the most accessible Burnsides I have read but also quite possibly the most difficult - these can coexist. I think it asks the most of the reader. if my memory serves (not a given)
ok so JB initiates with mirrors and traditionally the rebus happens here and I think we see some of that with more or less sly parallels of himself - or indeed invocations - with Hardy, Strauss, Apollinaire (in an excellent sequence-rendition of his Alcools), Zoroaster/zarathustra. Fascinating little capitulation to O'Hara in a reread of his The Day Lady Died. yes these are mirror-selves - with Strauss's Tod und Verklärung! Now THaTS a daring self-portrait. But the autobiography I feel can work in the heart of the mirror - the kidnapped sister, the absent father, the prodigal son. Yes these are true but! These are absences, empty mirrors which all the same, being poems are trapped with their content-presences. As he warns that his grandmother's soul risks eternal stuck-ness in her many mirrors if they are left uncovered. (I think this is also why Browning is such an easy reach for comparison with this first section - there they all are on the wall - poems).
Look the collection is so insistent of Itself but just about every poem hammers back to a modulation of the theme - One Breath. JB's deep ecology is enticingly present I'll expand in a sec. I'd find it even more difficult to read this without Ecclesiastes. I keep coming back to what seems a spare oxymoron in Instructions for a Sky Burial: 'something inexact and perfect forms itself'. Look I don't claim to have Understanding of this collection let alone what John is reaching to. But I couldn't help thinking (prompted by the context) of Plath's mirror - 'silver and exact' - and trying to reconcile the perfect and inexact. Maybe it's just the most obvious solution but precisely the title gives it - the deep ecology of 'All One Breath' (swap 'breath' for 'spirit' if you like). A concatenation of species, imprecisions and rough edges, which together constitute said perfect breath/spirit
my opinion but just what was running about. a collection that presents itself baldly and can be consumed without too many problems. but I stand by thinking of its difficulty this way. he's not so far from geoffrey hill's finer moments than we may think
ok so JB initiates with mirrors and traditionally the rebus happens here and I think we see some of that with more or less sly parallels of himself - or indeed invocations - with Hardy, Strauss, Apollinaire (in an excellent sequence-rendition of his Alcools), Zoroaster/zarathustra. Fascinating little capitulation to O'Hara in a reread of his The Day Lady Died. yes these are mirror-selves - with Strauss's Tod und Verklärung! Now THaTS a daring self-portrait. But the autobiography I feel can work in the heart of the mirror - the kidnapped sister, the absent father, the prodigal son. Yes these are true but! These are absences, empty mirrors which all the same, being poems are trapped with their content-presences. As he warns that his grandmother's soul risks eternal stuck-ness in her many mirrors if they are left uncovered. (I think this is also why Browning is such an easy reach for comparison with this first section - there they all are on the wall - poems).
Look the collection is so insistent of Itself but just about every poem hammers back to a modulation of the theme - One Breath. JB's deep ecology is enticingly present I'll expand in a sec. I'd find it even more difficult to read this without Ecclesiastes. I keep coming back to what seems a spare oxymoron in Instructions for a Sky Burial: 'something inexact and perfect forms itself'. Look I don't claim to have Understanding of this collection let alone what John is reaching to. But I couldn't help thinking (prompted by the context) of Plath's mirror - 'silver and exact' - and trying to reconcile the perfect and inexact. Maybe it's just the most obvious solution but precisely the title gives it - the deep ecology of 'All One Breath' (swap 'breath' for 'spirit' if you like). A concatenation of species, imprecisions and rough edges, which together constitute said perfect breath/spirit
my opinion but just what was running about. a collection that presents itself baldly and can be consumed without too many problems. but I stand by thinking of its difficulty this way. he's not so far from geoffrey hill's finer moments than we may think
steph_demel's review against another edition
3.0
I've only recently discovered Burnside's poetry, but I'm already very much a fan. The title of this collection derives from a biblical quotation that describes the inter-connectedness and inter-dependency of all living things on earth: such a vision importantly underlies Burnside's thematic preoccupations in these poems. Poems about identity, self-realisation, and human relationships jostle against ones that evoke the multiform beauty of nature; they are united here by a common sense of vitality and rich profundity.
Burnside's nature poems display an earthy sensuousness that evokes, for me, the work of Seamus Heaney. Like Heaney's, Burnside's images of nature are predominantly ones that highlight its irrevocable entanglement with human life, whether through references to agriculture and animal husbandry, or through instances in which people leave the boundaries of their domesticity to trespass on the wild, or vice versa. Thus, apparently simple events such as a walk in the woods, or the death of an injured goldfinch carried "into the house/ for a moment's shelter", become liminal spaces in which humanity negotiates, in both positive and negative ways, its relationship with the rest of the natural world.
While this collection certainly celebrates life in all its various forms, it also is notably (and fittingly) shadowed by death. The dead haunt these poems, in memory, in mirrors, in longed-for ghosts. This manner of juxtaposing death against images of fecundity in nature, and of thereby linking human life to the seasons and cycles of the natural world, once again recalls for me Heaney's poetry - in particular, his collection "Seeing Things", which is thickly peopled with both meadows and ghosts.
In brief, then, this is an admirable collection of haunting, lyrical poetry, and I look forward to reading much more of Burnside's work in the near future.
Burnside's nature poems display an earthy sensuousness that evokes, for me, the work of Seamus Heaney. Like Heaney's, Burnside's images of nature are predominantly ones that highlight its irrevocable entanglement with human life, whether through references to agriculture and animal husbandry, or through instances in which people leave the boundaries of their domesticity to trespass on the wild, or vice versa. Thus, apparently simple events such as a walk in the woods, or the death of an injured goldfinch carried "into the house/ for a moment's shelter", become liminal spaces in which humanity negotiates, in both positive and negative ways, its relationship with the rest of the natural world.
While this collection certainly celebrates life in all its various forms, it also is notably (and fittingly) shadowed by death. The dead haunt these poems, in memory, in mirrors, in longed-for ghosts. This manner of juxtaposing death against images of fecundity in nature, and of thereby linking human life to the seasons and cycles of the natural world, once again recalls for me Heaney's poetry - in particular, his collection "Seeing Things", which is thickly peopled with both meadows and ghosts.
In brief, then, this is an admirable collection of haunting, lyrical poetry, and I look forward to reading much more of Burnside's work in the near future.
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