John Burnside

The Pit Town in Winter

Language: english

Translations: german (Zechenstadt im Winter)

The Pit Town in Winter

Everything would vanish in the snow,
fox bones and knuckles of coal
and dolls left out in the gardens,
red-mouthed and nude.

We shovelled and swept the paths,
but they melted away in the night
and the cars stood buried and dumb
on Fulford Road.

We might as well be lost, she said;
but I felt the neighbours dreaming in the dark,
and saw them wrapped in overcoats and scarves
on Sundays: careful, narrow-footed souls,
become the creatures of a sudden light,
amazed at how mysterious they were.

John Burnside

photo © Dirk Skiba

* 19.03.1955, Dunfermline, United Kingdom
lives in: Fife, United Kingdom

John Burnside (born in 1955 in Dunfermline, Scotland) – his rich and award winning work covers books of poetry, novels and autobiographical prose.
Grown up in Corby, Northamptonshire, he studied English and European Languages at Cambridge College of Arts and Technology, and worked for many years as a computer analyst and software engineer. He became a freelance writer in 1996, the same year he returned to live in Fife.

Burnside stands beside Seamus Heaney as one of the major writers in English of the last 50 years. In his texts he captures in an unique way “the other life of things”. The “great spectacle of the real” is presented in his poems in a powerful language.

photo © Dirk Skiba

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