'Awake between two worlds': John Burnside's Poetics of Ecology (2009-2019)

This thesis explores John Burnside’s poetic output between 2009 and 2019 encompassing four collections: The Hunt in the Forest (2009), Black Cat Bone (2011), All One Breath (2014), and Still Life with Feeding Snake (2017). I argue that Burnside’s later poetry develops his longstanding ecological disposition which is now a unique form of post-secular thought in the face of the climate crisis. I point to the wide-ranging intelligence in his poetry, considering his critical prose writing as well, coalescing around his 2019 monograph on poetry of the twentieth century, The Music of Time. Through his multiple influences, I claim that Burnside’s poetry provides an urgent philosophical perspective on our relationship to the natural world and furnishes an understanding of what could constitute peaceful dwelling. I respond to his writing across a breadth of inherited traditions through which his poetry creates a new interdisciplinary approach to the myriad questions about human relationships with animals, plants, and the nonhuman.

Across the thesis I explore the idea of ecological grief conditioned by a paradox between the breakdown of the concept of ‘oikos’ in the relationship between economics and ecology epitomised in part by the financial crash of 2008 which fixes the starting point of my engagement. To do this I ground his poetry in the contingent world of late capitalism and the growing anxieties of technology and ecological crisis, whilst at the same time exploring a suspended temporality which encompasses a spilt catechesis, a pagan sensibility, a folkloric cosmology, and the epochal shift of new timescales prompted by the Anthropocene. From this impasse comes a poetry of grace that bridges both public and private rituals of loss and grief and allows for a compassionate openness towards the urgent questions of ecological crisis.