News > Book festival preview: The Hunt in the Forest | Rain
MORTALITY stalks through the pages of these two superlative collections of poetry. Don Paterson's Rain includes a long elegy, "Phantom", for the poet Michael Donaghy, as well as his spiky, aphoristic renku, "My Last Thirty-Five Deaths". John Burnside's The Hunt In The Forest opens with "Learning to Swim", in which the poet recollects "the death I had lost"; and features work entitled "In Memoriam" and "The Art of Dying", and where even "the morning has the air of hospice flowers".
THE HUNT IN THE FOREST
John Burnside
Jonathan Cape, £10
RAIN
Don Paterson
Faber & Faber, £12.99
But it is the differences, in tone, tenor and timbre that single out these volumes as the works of contemporary classics, rather than a coincidence of theme. They have radically differing world views: Paterson's "The Day" begins: "Life is no miracle. Its sparks flare up / invisibly across the night" – a kind of stoical, steely clear-sightedness. Burnside's "Kapelløya", conversely, starts "Wonders will never / cease" and his poetry constantly seeks to reaffirm an almost spiritual insightfulness. Put starkly, Burnside takes God seriously and Paterson takes the Death of God seriously.
"The Day" finds a kind of companion piece in Burnside's "Documentary". Paterson's poem imagines another Earth, "another town whose today-light / won't reach a night of ours till Kirriemuir / is nothing but a vein of hematite", and eavesdrops on the discussions of two lovers, "as like ourselves as makes no odds". They discuss the horror of existentialism: "each of us a separate universe... we only dream this place up in one head" and conclude that is "why we have this crap / of souls and gods and ghosts and afterlives. Not to... bridge eternity. Just the gap' - / she measures it – 'from here to here.'" In the wider context of an unremittingly meaningless cosmos, they tentatively assert human significance.
Burnside's poem starts "somewhere from one of those slightly too plausible films / where the street is a parallel street in a parallel world". The parallel selves, "brighter and more successful than we seem" are touched by the sense of their quantum copies. The final stanzas are almost hymn-like and offer a quiet benediction in place of an atomised void: "everything coming to light in a fold of time / where something that never was, or might have been, / occurs, at last, in some infinity, / to people much like us, though not quite us, / who think of us more fondly than we know".
The title poem of Paterson's collection ends hauntingly: "forget the ink, the milk, the blood - / all was washed clean with the flood / we rose up from the falling waters / the fallen rain's own sons and daughters / and none of this, none of this matters".
By chance, Burnside also has a poem titled "Rain", with an epigraph from The Office of the Holy Spirit. In the chill and still after rain, Burnside finds "the dead are no longer sleeping, or lying awake, / though the spirit is creeping, inchwise, through mortar and blood, / unpicking the fabric, renewing the face of the earth". Burnside's moments of grace are always tinged with melancholy; Paterson's epiphanies of emptiness are always laced with hope.
Stylistically, they are also complementary. Paterson's poetry strives towards a lapidary concision. His use of rhyme is adamant but never overbearing (and it is probably one of the most difficult technical exercises to keep the flow of sense and syntax while adhering to perfect rhymes). Burnside's poetry is more open, but underpinned by subtle sound effects. He often builds up alliterations in preparation for a stark, onomatopoeic change: in "Poppy Day", he describes a butcher "on the kill floor, veiled in a butterslick / circumflex of marrowfat and bone".
But both collections allow for virtuoso moments in different styles. Paterson's "Song for Natalie 'Tusja' Beridze" throws caution to the wind in an extravaganza of geeky charm.
And love poetry can be hackneyed and sentimental, but it is to Burnside's great credit that he finds genuinely new articulations of sincerity.
One such profound and moving collection would be a book to treasure. To have two is phenomenal.
John Burnside and Don Paterson are at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, 29 August, 2.30pm
