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
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.
ancestors gathered
Our ancestors went to the woods to find fuel; they set snares there for birds and gathered nuts and fungi.
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A forest - the word dates back to the Norman occupancy, when it meant an area set aside for England's violent new masters to hunt boar and deer - is necessarily larger than a wood. It belonged to the king and was a fit place for his recreation.
beauty debatable girl love possessed sly though
Sometimes, though only in my most unguarded moments, I can still think of Annette Winters as my first love. At fifteen, she was tall, slender, very dark: an intelligent, sly girl possessed of what I think of now, though I didn't think of then, as a kind of debatable beauty.
art bird
Sadly, bird illustration has always been an under-appreciated art.
The older I get, the happier my childhood becomes.
announcing found
One day I was talking about what I was going to do next, and just found myself announcing it: 'I'm going to write a book about my father.'
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I don't want to suggest that matrimony was necessarily a tragic affair - some of our neighbours' marriages seemed quite functional, if somewhat routine; nevertheless, in the workaday world, it is wedlock that is most likely to offer the occasion for life-threatening disappointment.
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A modern arboretum brings us that ancient forest and, with it, a changed apprehension of time, a renewed appreciation of the elegance of natural form and a renewed sense of wonder at the variety of the world we inhabit.
images marvellous
'The Gardener' is more than a marvellous collection of images by a master photographer.
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The great pleasure that comes from reading poets such as Mark Doty and Marianne Moore is the realisation that the essential virtues - compassion, wonder, humility, respect for the mysterious - are far from conventionally heroic.
You can't sit down and decide what you want to write about.
dwelling humans plants
I think humans have to learn a new way of dwelling on this earth. A way of living with their companions: animals, plants and fish.
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I remember playing the Mad Hatter in a school play and feeling very comfortable in the character.