John Burnside (1955-2024) was a very prolific Scottish writer who died this May. Though principally a poet he produced works of fiction, essays, reviews and also a prize-winning memoir. His is a very congenial voice, though I do sometimes feel, as with so much contemporary poetry, that his work could have done with a bit more shaping, being ever mindful of Frost’s pithy but slightly too sweeping condemnation of free verse: ‘like playing tennis with the net down’. But when Burnside gets it right, as here, he combines exactitude with a haunting music that more than compensates for any lack of formality.

The Persistence of Memory

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

the others are being called
through the evening dusk

– Kenny and Marek, the Corrigans, Alex McClure –
mothers and sisters calling them home for tea

from kitchens fogged with steam and buttered toast,
broth on the hot plate, ham hough and yellow lentils.

Barely a wave, then they’re gone, till no one is left,
and the dark from the woods closes in on myself alone,

the animals watching, the older gods
couched in the shadows.

Decades ago, I suppose,
though I cannot be sure.

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

John Burnside