John Burnside
John Burnside
John Burnsideis a Scottish writer, born in Dunfermline. He is one of only two poetsto have won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the same book...
NationalityScottish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth19 March 1955
objects seen
One of the most beautiful objects I have ever seen was a Yupik wolf mask, made in Nunivak in around 1890.
painted
Many of the birds Audubon painted are now extinct, and still we go on killing them, more or less casually, with our pesticides and wires and machinery.
best looked threw
'Moby-Dick' really threw me. I read it when I was 14 and my best friends were books. It changed the way I looked at the world.
book car copies destroy tried
My first book was a car crash. I tried to find all the copies and destroy them.
finest offers robin
My editor, Robin Robertson, is one of this country's finest poets, so I listen to him when he offers advice.
almost fearful later proportion saw tough
My father was this big, tough guy, almost heroic in proportion to me as a child. It was only later that I saw how fearful he was.
argued human
With human beings it could be argued that all music-making is, in essence, grounded in improvisation.
family found left moved quickly ten west work
When I was ten years old, my family left a cold, damp prefab in West Fife and moved to Corby, Northamptonshire, where my father quickly found work at what was then the Stewarts & Lloyds steelworks.
history knew larger offer personal realised
When you have a child, you think about your personal history and what you offer them as a larger narrative, and I realised I knew nothing about my father's circumstances other than what he'd told me.
advertising becomes commodity essential history immediate less life nature passing
With each passing decade, history becomes less real for us, less immediate and essential to our way of life, and so, like 'green' nature, more of a commodity or an advertising gimmick.
avenue burns coal felt local version
For a boy of ten, used to the coal bings and rust-coloured burns of Cowdenbeath, the fields and woodland of Kingswood, with its overgrown but stately avenue of copper-barked sequoias, felt like a local version of paradise.
australian berlin careful collection devoted finer leading order tropical
The Botanischer Garten in Berlin has one of Europe's finer winter trails, leading in careful order from glasshouses devoted to African-American and Australian desert species, through a fine collection of tropical plants, and on to the orchid house.
beautiful cliche fear great joseph life matter paintings wolf works
It may be a cliche, but cliche or not, I fear the day when the only marsh harriers or peregrines I can look at are in paintings by Joseph Wolf or Bruno Liljefors - and no matter how beautiful those works may be, life is the great thing: life, life, life.
encounter passed realise takes
It takes a true encounter to realise that real animals, wild animals, have all but passed from our lives.