John Burnside, A Normal Skin, Cape Poetry, 1997, pp 60, ISBN 0 224 042 86 6 LDS 7.00

In his last collection of poetry, "Swimming in the Flood" (1995), John Burnside mapped out the topography of a natural world, half rural, half urban, which gave a chilling echo to the preoccupations of a Britain where the countryside seems to have become the domain of sex-offenders and missing children. In his delicate excisions of News at Six nightmares -- of the shallow grave, and the "interrupted park" -- he took us into the undergrowth of nature in the nineties.

‘A Normal Skin’, Burnside’s sixth and latest volume of poetry, sees no mellowing of vision. Nature remains the place of nettles, road kills and the repressed. Indeed in a collection where barely a poem is without its corpse or trace of carnage, the body count has probably risen. However, there is a definite sense of having stepped back from the darkest and most troubling areas of Burnside’s concerns: the taboos of the earlier volume's `Catch Kiss', `Lack of Evidence’ and `A Folk Story' have been replaced by a more personal and elusive version of pastoral.

‘Penitence’, the final poem in the collection with its moment of motorised inattention, slaughtered deer and sudden apprehension of dread -- a sense that "something beyond the trees was tuning in" -- condenses many of the volume’s themes. The ubiquitous road kill is emblematic of Burnside’s vision of our relationship with the natural world as one of collision and unwitting carnage. The sense of dread, that this unwitting slaughter must exact some form of psychic or spiritual retribution, is the theme which Burnside has made his own and it is its attention to the consequences of inattention that supplies his verse with its typical and distinctively sinister perspective.

The forms of inattention here are various. The motorist drifting off in ‘Penitence’ is the most obvious, more subtle is the gradual silting up of personal relationships recorded in the title poem: "For years you would buy those razors with orange handles,/ the toothpastes and mild shampoos for a sensitive skin/ I never had." From the laureate of the liminal that denial of sensitivity seems rinsed with irony. No poet could listen more carefully for the "smallest shiver in the hedge" nor strain so intently to detect the evidence of the "world too subtle for our eyes". It seems that there is no presence too slight to be registered in a verse where "windowpanes/ are clouded with the afterlife/ of cat fur and busy lizzies"; which is conscious of "the creak of water stalling in the pipes,/ a fall of soot, the first milk of decay/ filming the bones of mice beneath the stairs".

Yet that heightened sensitivity is not the devotion of a naturalist, rather it is born out of an ever present fear of retribution. The lines from `After the Storm’, "the silence feels unnatural,/ as if the storm is what we need’ epitomise the general sense of waiting with bated breath, of "listening for nothing", that imbues his verse. The vision of nature reenacted throughout the collection is that of the guilt driven returning to the scene of a crime. Often, as in "Penitence" the return is literal and dramatic:

But now and then I drive out to the woods

and park the car: the headlamps fill with moths;

the woods tune in; I listen to the night

and hear an echo, fading through the trees,

my own flesh in the body of the deer

still resonant, remembered through the fender.

Elsewhere, the return takes the more general form of a meditation on memory’s obsessive siftings as it searches out the significant detail overlooked in the moment of experience. In `A Photograph of Old East Fife’ we see memory triumphant. Beginning, "I’m thinking of when you could buy/ returns/ Of buses that no longer run/ beyond the cemetery ...", it moves into a faultless study of the longing and estrangement bound up with thoughts of home. In the title poem, however, this form of return receives a more dismissive treatment: "For years, I took apart/ the memories I thought would make me whole".

The impulse to surrender to memory in the effort to recover "the pure geography/ of childhood" in `A Muddy Road by Adam Johnson’s House’ is undercut by the recognition in `Pentimenti’ that "memory is all accomplishment", while in `Shekinah’ he notes, "it’s always a surprise/ that coming home is only to the given". The same ambiguity that characterises the return of memory is found in Burnside’s treatment of nature’s threatened return. In one poem he holds the door ajar to a totemic order, affirming that "those creatures we imagine on the stairs/ are real", in another he banishes the forces that threaten to displace the "day’s pale knowledge": "I know this ghost. It’s only a drift of smoke/ in the summer darkness". Burnside delights in the luxuriance of his gothicry while simultaneously recognising that he is telling himself fireside tales: "if anything exists besides ourselves/ I’ll hear it on the air".

The results of this simultaneous invocation and denial of the potency of memory and nature can be mesmeric. In the long poem "A Process of Separation" the shifting identities marked out by the personal pronoun — the memory of a lover, the ghost of the father — are mirrored by a delicate form of verbal shape shifting. Thus a sequence which describes the speaker’s inability to bury his father's shade culminates in the memorable image of of something "lost between the floor boards and the wall: / a knot of hair; an aftermath of feathers." The craft of that final pun reveals the artifice of Burnside’s verse, undercutting the poem’s consciously sinister effects with a hint of pure textuality.

Instances of this ludic delight at the heart of Burnside’s calculated gothicism are to be found throughout the volume. In `Pentimenti’ the poem’s peculiarly slippery imagery is resolved by the simple substitution of "blanks" for "banks", while the title poem itself, with its dismantled clocks and normal skin seems to turn on some intricate confusion of "wound" and "unwound".

In lyrics such as these Burnside’s poetics resembles a form of metaphysical verse in which the conceit has been sublimated. The same holds true for the collection as a whole. Individual poems seem connected by a logic "too subtle for our eyes". In the sequence of poems, ‘The Blind’, ‘Restoring Instruments’ and ‘Feeding the Clownfish’, for example, we move from a meditation on a class of blind children going to the public baths, to an attempt to restore the identity of their owners from the smell of broken musical instruments, to conjectures on the dreams of exotic fish. Slight lyrics in themselves, they are, like the blind children in the pool, "attuned to one another" and together they seem to sketch a fragile logic lying just beyond cognition, working in Burnside’s favoured terrain "at the edge of your vision".

At other times the current guiding this collection seems lost. The amplification of themes turns into a simple reiteration of concerns. His father’s "cryptic love, his taste for carrion" is just a little too cryptic: a rehearsal of effects which runs the risk of becoming parodic. As such `A Normal Skin’ has the feel of a half-way station: an exploration of ground already mapped out in earlier collections. This said, Burnside’s landscape, his world of "alleys to nothing// but nettles/ and broken walls" is one which repays the reader’s closest attention.

Niall Martin, 1998, Amsterdam