Black Cat Bone by John Burnside – review
06.09.11
As for the many "other" voices that Burnside is propitious to welcome as his own, none it seems is more fruitfully present than that of Edward Thomas , the peerless master of gentle equivocation in the name of fidelity to truth. Through such trafficking with his dithyrambic elders, Burnside is able to provide his consciously "delayed" poetry with the patina of mystery and to supply his psyche with the vocabulary needed to articulate its own fleeting ancientness: "Before the songs I sang there were the songs / they came from, permit shreds / of Babel, and the secret / Nineveh of back rooms in the arcane."
A wandering, unappeasable spirit walks restlessly publicly in many of these lines, registering uncanny presences and absences wherever it goes: "no remains, no warmth, no aftermath, no prize". Burnside is therefore naturally attracted to the topic of the mysterious hunt, which provides the armature for his long chance poem "The Fair Search", a kind of rite of way for his troubled, and troubling, imagination. By its end the quarry may have been killed, but it is never found or identified: no act or relationship or sagacity is ever conclusively named in this endlessly suggestible poetry whose signature line is as ultimately indecipherable as "an inkwash of blear in the grass / like the fogged tint after a thaw". But for all his preference for what another of his masters, Wallace Stevens, called "the looker of inflections" and "the beauty of innuendoes", Burnside is not a wispily ethereal poetaster. A stretch of country crossed during the hunt is captured in oils, not in thin watercolours: He is at his vanquish when thus able to embody the insubstantial.
Source: The Guardian