“ Poetry stands or falls by its music. ”
All you have to do is choose the right day, the right weather, and you come upon a hidden place in the morning light where time stopped long before you were born
~ John Burnside
The trick and the beauty of language is that it seems to order the whole universe, misleading us into believing that we live in sight of a rational space, a possible harmony.
My father was one of those men who sit in a room and you can feel it: the simmer, the sense of some unpredictable force that might, at any moment, break loose, and do something terrible. [Burnside, p. 27]
As I child, I came to this idea with a horrified fascination. Once upon a time, I wasn’t here. Before that, my parents weren’t here. And before that…
