Poetry:John Burnside has become a defining and prolific presence in British poetry. His poems' seriousness, about human contact with the natural world and about religious language, seem to question the more streetwise, sardonic irony usually associated with contemporary British poetry.
Burnside's new collection is a big, interesting book, which finds a fittingly grand and illuminating theological context for his characteristic emphasis on man's fallen, unhappy, yearning existence. It consists of three sequences, a long form that habitually allows him room to best tease out his meditative style, and he is upfront as ever about his preoccupations: the title sequence borrows its title from the Shaker idea of songs as gifts; another is titled Responses to Augustine of Hippo while the book's closing sequence, with somehow appropriate hubris, is titled Four Quartets.
Each sequence dwells on the estrangement of the self, from the world and from itself:
The shapes we mistake
for love
a garden in summer;
the sound the wind makes
pausing in the leaves;
the shapes we mistake for ourselves
at the edge of the water
- turning a moment
then slipping away to a depth
that never existed
(De Libero Arbitrio)
The poems constantly return to this moment of impossible escape or doubleness. There are also, in the title sequence, tight, powerful poems about his formative childhood exposure to religion and religious language, "hoarse with the promise of song/ and the grace notes of terror" (Prayer). However, many of these new poems seem happier, or less restless:
We go for months with phantoms in our heads
till, filling a bath, or fetching the laundry in,
we see ourselves again, at home, illumined,
folding a sheet, or pouring a glass of milk,
bright in the here and now, and unencumbered.
(Lares)
Sometimes, transcendence is too pointedly lying in wait in the poems' opening premises, as in Le Croisic where he weakly (and unconvincingly) rhymes his disapproval of "a jogger, tuned to the venom/ of Eminem", but Burnside's style is distinctive and more compelling than ever in this new book, in its step-by-step progress across and down the page. These poems' occasional problems, also evident in his mentor, TS Eliot, may be typical of an ambitious poetry sometimes more interested in ideas and themes than in image or sound.
MICHAEL SCHMIDT IS better known as the founder and editor of PN Review and the Carcanet Press (incidentally John Burnside's first publisher). The book's title suggests it too will wrestle with angels, and The Resurrection of the Body does begin with a loose response to Pangur Bán, imagining a monk's life in a medieval monastery. However, like Robin Flower and Kuno Meyer before him, Schmidt warms to the original's sly celebration of the ordinary things of the world and he makes it clear that the monk's companionable cat is preferable to St Jerome's fierce lion. This poem establishes the collection's often sly, humane tone, in poems much more interested in the physical pleasures of the world than in Christ or the soul.
Schmidt's poems have always travelled and his itinerary is often literary as when he describes Lisbon in A Red Grove:
Seven hills, though Virgil never walked there,
A river signifying things all over, all the sloops
And caravels departed; castle, tower,
A ring of tawdry highways.
As the poem progresses, though, it becomes, typically, more narrative and personal. Lisbon disappears and, in its place, "I heard a music out of you, a rise and fall". Even Schmidt's more formally repetitive and lyrical poems usually round off into stories, as in affecting poems for his father (Not Yet) and a failed relationship (Third Persons). The book's best poem, though, is a surprising, headlong response to a William Cowper poem: both surreally comic and erotic, John Gilpin Eludes the Hunt has John Gilpin choose "to slide/ under the horse as it ran":
The man hugged its long neck
With both arms and his thighs
Clasps the belly tight.
The horse came out on top
And seemed to ride the man
Faster and further off.
And, as the poem ends:
The horse lies down beside
And places its frothing head
Giant and full of love
Against the rider's curve,
Against his cheek and his heart.
John McAuliffe's second collection of poems, Next Door, will be published next week by The Gallery Press . He directs the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester
Gift Songs By John Burnside Jonathan Cape, £9 The Resurrection of the Body By Michael Schmidt Smith/Doorstop, £8.95