::Arc Poetry:: Great Scots - April 2006 Archive ::

April 20, 2006

April 2006 : Feature

Aislinn Hunter introducing John Burnside

I first discovered John Burnside’s poetry the way most poets discover other writers: in the form of a slim volume sitting on a crammed bookshelf in a good bookstore. First of all I liked the title of the book (The Light Trap) and the look of the font. I also liked the author’s name: it seemed warm and somehow familial. I pulled the book out, opened it up and read a few lines. There it was: a sense of travel, of being Elsewhere, of seeing another world as no one, save John Burnside, has ever seen it. Who in Canada would write, as Burnside does in Common Knowledge, of “The classes of jamjars. Subtleties of string”? Of “tubers locked in bottles, sprouting wings”? No one I knew of. But more than that, more than the specifics of language and place, Burnside was good: a good philosopher and a good technician; a rigorous examiner of the common and the ephemeral; of the seemingly insignificant and the large.

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The Scotland-Canada poetry handshake

Each time he visits the Montreal home of fellow scribe Michael Harris and his partner Carolyn O’Neill, Stephen Heighton, one of Canada’s best-known poets, finds himself staring at one particular wall in their house.

On it, in the form of a one-of-a-kind, homemade broadside, hangs the poem ‘Wedding the Locksmith’s Daughter’ by contemporary Scot Robin Robertson. “Every time I visit the house I read that poem and it keeps getting better, richer, odder,” says Heighton. “I want to see if Robertson has other poems that good. I suspect he does.”

Thus, Heighton didn’t hesitate to take up the challenge of writing on Robinson for the first official ‘webbing’ of Canadian and Scottish contemporary poets, a literary experiment lovingly engineered by Arc Poetry Magazine and the Scottish Poetry Library.

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Scotland-Canada