{"id":12697,"date":"2025-07-22T06:12:08","date_gmt":"2025-07-22T06:12:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/12697\/"},"modified":"2025-07-22T06:12:08","modified_gmt":"2025-07-22T06:12:08","slug":"the-empire-of-forgetting-by-john-burnside-review-last-words-from-an-essential-poet-of-our-age-poetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/12697\/","title":{"rendered":"The Empire of Forgetting by John Burnside review \u2013 last words from an essential poet of our age | Poetry"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Burnside died in May 2024, aged 69. In life, he was almost preternaturally prolific. He started late<\/a> \u2013 his debut, The Hoop, didn\u2019t appear until he was in his early 30s \u2013 but with that first poetry collection a dam was breached; over the next three and a half decades, he published at the rate of nearly a book a year.<\/p>\n

His output was eclectic: 17 collections were interspersed with novels (notable among them the ravishing A Summer of Drowning<\/a>, set in far-north Norway under a luminescent midnight sun) and a trio of bleached and harrowing memoirs that laid bare the catastrophe and disintegration of his early life. But he was a poet first and foremost, a poet in his heart. To read his poetry is to feel, just for a moment, as if the world\u2019s edges have been pushed back; as if, by standing beside him, you too can see further and more clearly. The shock of his final collection isn\u2019t that it exists; it\u2019s no surprise at all to hear him from beyond the grave. Rather, it\u2019s the realisation that, after the astonishing generosity of these last decades, what we have in our hands really are his final words.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s our great good fortune, then, that Burnside\u2019s closing work is also one of his finest. The poems are few in number \u2013 just 19 \u2013 but there\u2019s no impression, often present in posthumous collections, of a structure hastily assembled out of ill-fitting parts. In fact, The Empire of Forgetting is marked both by its coherence \u2013 thematic, imagistic and linguistic \u2013 and a sense of its fitness. These are poems that deal directly and almost exclusively with mortality.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t, of course, new territory for Burnside: his poetry has always been death-haunted, peopled with\u00a0ghosts. But here the focus has shifted, from the general (loss, religion, afterlife, decay) to the specific. The whole collection is an anticipation of, a grappling with, his own death: \u201cthe darkness-to-come\u201d.<\/p>\n

In a handful of the poems, he appears to meet the matter head-on. Last Days, with its mentions of \u201chospice\u201d and funereal \u201cwhite chrysanthemums\u201d, offers a vision of \u201cstarlight at the far end of the ward \/ where time has stopped, the way it sometimes stops \/ in theatres, when the actors leave the stage\u201d. A little further on, in As If from the End Times, he picks up the word \u201clast\u201d (which sounds like a bell throughout the collection) and weaves it through the poem, most plangently in the elegiac central stanza, which describes \u201cLast day of birdsong; salt rain in the trees; \/ the echo of someone going about \/ their business, making good or making hay \/ \u2013 you never know for sure, although you know \/ that something here is coming to an end\u201d. But for the most part, his impending mortality is considered more obliquely, through the twin lenses, familiar to Burnside-watchers, of nature (damaged, depleted, but still sublime) and memory.<\/p>\n

It is memory \u2013 and its shadow, forgetting \u2013 to which Burnside keeps circling back in this collection, the space that it takes up here offering a clear and poignant mirror of the space it takes up in our lives as we move past middle age. His mother and father, both frequent presences in his work, take the stage again: the former a locus of endless longing; the latter a baleful \u201ctrail \/ of Players No 6 and coal-tar soap\u201d.<\/p>\n

Burnside imagines his way into death, and in doing so, comes close to writing an epitaph for himself<\/p>\n

Burnside\u2019s writing, particularly in his memoirs, is dominated by his father\u2019s bitter legacy, but as he himself draws nearer to the end, it is his mother to whom he turns. In the heart-catching title poem, he leans into poetry\u2019s ability to efface time, locating the pair of them in a soft-lit, sweet-scented version of his childhood. \u201cWhat if my mother walked home in the grey of morning, one last day\u201d, he writes, going on to imagine a reunion that is almost epiphanic, a \u201cmomentary \/\/ halcyon of everyone \/ together, voices, singsong in the dark\u201d. To Burnside the afterlife isn\u2019t a voyaging out, but a voyaging in: a route back into the lost past.<\/p>\n

And this past, when he conjures it, is marked by its externality: it\u2019s not the houses and furniture of memory that he craves, but the seasons, the \u201cevening dusk\u201d, the \u201cquince, or damson, strafed into the grass\u201d, \u201cthe field where, once, \/ we played Dead Man\u2019s Fall\u201d. The purity and clarity of nature in the past is counterpointed by the present: \u201ca ruined \/ thicket, sump oil \/ rotting in the grass, a spill \/ of Roundup in a rut of mud and dock\u201d.<\/p>\n

This is the Burnside we know: attentive to the degradation of nature; staring it in the face and obliging us to stare at it, too. But in his final collection, more often than not, it\u2019s the beauty that possesses him. These are poems filled with songbirds, orchards, \u201cbirch woods\u201d, litanies of flowers (\u201cfoxgloves, purple \/ loosestrife, sprawls \/ of clematis\u201d). The weather is beneficent: sunlight filters, snow drifts and blankets, frost \u201cperforms its secret ministry\u201d, there\u2019s the sound of \u201csmall rain in the leaves\u201d. The world we see here, through the eyes of a poet at the end of his life, is almost unbearably beautiful \u2013 which makes the leave-taking unbearable too.<\/p>\n

At the heart of the collection is The Memory Wheel, in which Burnside imagines his way into death, and in doing so comes close to writing an epitaph for himself. The poem concludes on the image of a memory: of \u201cthose mornings \/ when we shivered from our beds \/ and lit a fire \/ to magnify the dark\u201d. If Burnside\u2019s poetry \u2013 all his writing, but his poetry most powerfully of all \u2013 can be summed up, it might be like this: a bright light, an illumination that, in its beauty, reveals the depth of the darkness that surrounds us.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s impossible not to love the world more when reading Burnside, and impossible not to be more scared and saddened while doing so. He was the ideal laureate of our age, painfully alive to the glory of what we\u2019re losing. Now we\u2019ve lost him, our Anthropocene spirit guide. A light has gone out.<\/p>\n

The Empire of Forgetting by John Burnside is published by Jonathan Cape (\u00a313). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com<\/a>. Delivery charges may apply.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"John Burnside died in May 2024, aged 69. In life, he was almost preternaturally prolific. He started late…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12698,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[64,63,457,134],"class_list":{"0":"post-12697","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-books","11":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12697"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12697\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}