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
attractive beyond exist happiness nature
As attractive as it is, the idea that nature can exist beyond our dangerous 'instinct for happiness' is never the whole story.
consumed felt
As a child, I was consumed with a near-obsessive curiosity about what the world felt like for other creatures.
europe northern seems time
Andoya is in a different world, set at the northern edge of Europe in what seems to be a time and weather of its own.
deny man warmth
A man was defined, in my father's circles, by what he could bear, the pain he could shrug off, the warmth or comfort he could deny himself.
believe
A mad person isn't someone who sees what isn't there; he's someone who sees what is there but that others can't see. I really believe that.
century disappoint forests great landscapes rivers
I know that the only reason American landscapes sometimes disappoint me is that, just a century before I was born, the great rivers and prairies and wild forests still existed. And they were sublime.
areas electricity enormous gas projects
Worldwide, enormous areas of peatland are still being lost to agricultural development, drainage schemes, overgrazing, and exploitation-based infrastructure development projects such as roads, electricity pylons, telephone masts and gas pipelines.
collapse common continued human insects knowledge less population
It is common knowledge now that we depend on insects for our continued existence; that, without key pollinators, the human population would collapse in less than a decade.
best form hard hits wind
Sometimes, when the wind hits hard and icicles form on the sea cliffs, we can all come together - and at those times, we are at our best.
human time
Once upon a time, forests were repositories of magic for the human race.
time
It's important to have quiet time and isolation.
anyone elegant hawk stopped
Anyone who has ever stopped to watch a hawk in flight will know that this is one of the natural world's most elegant phenomena.
abundance air chance clean existence filling life living mass meadows repeated require rivers steady truth
This is a truth that should be repeated like a mantra: to have any chance of a ful - filling life, we require not only clean air and a steady climate, but also an abundance of meadows and woodlands, rivers and oceans, teeming with life and the mass existence of other living creatures.
alone anthology create deer distinct emerge encounter experience genre poem poems possible
The animal encounter poem is now so distinct a genre that it would be possible to create a full-length anthology from deer encounter poems alone, and many varieties of experience would emerge from such an exercise.