Transitory Brightness

John Burnside’s posthumous collection – he died in 2024 after a short illness – brings his extraordinary writing life to a close. Shelley wrote ‘the mind in creation is a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness’. Burnside’s ‘transitory brightness’ – glowing and haunted at the same time – is exemplified by the first section of the title poem, ‘The Empire of Forgetting’:

Out in the field where, once,
we played Dead Man’s Fall,

the others are being called
through the evening dusk

It concludes with a valedictory bow:

I have waited here, under the stars,
for the longest time.

Burnside is a poet of liminal spaces – between the human and non-human, the secular and divine, the living and the dead – and his poetry evokes a non-dual awareness that includes rather than divides, hinting at a possible more to life whilst never quite affirming transcendence on one hand or nullity on another. In this sense Burnside is a Romantic poet indebted to Wallace Stevens.

The Romantics believed that the development of rationality and instrumental reason had – according to the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor – ‘alienated us both from our own emotional nature and the Nature we live in’¹, and that overcoming that division, internally as well as externally, was ‘indissolubly linked’.² They worked to generate in their readers a ‘felt sense of a reality higher and deeper than the everyday world around us’. But they did so without making claims about the ontological status ...