John Burnside 1955-2024

The Editors at the LRB:

‘The trick is to create a world,’ John Burnside’s poem ‘Koi’ begins, ‘from nothing.’ Published in the LRB in 2001, it was one of nearly a hundred poems by Burnside that appeared in the paper between 1996 and his death last month at the age of 69. ‘The Persistence of Memory’ is published in the current issue:

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

the others are being called
through the evening dusk

As well as his many collections of poetry, Burnside was the author of several novels, two collections of short stories and three books of memoir.

Reviewing A Lie about My Father in 2006, Hilary Mantel called it a ‘challenging and troubling book’ by a ‘master of language, pushing language to do what it can.

more here.