Question

What is this poem about?

John Burnside - 'History'

It states it based in St Andrews; West Sands September 2001. Is this significant?

Please help me to understand this poem


Thankyou

Answer 1

Sept 11, 2001 is the date of the (9/11) attack on the World Trade Center in New York City. That is what he is talking about.

Answer 2

I have not read the poem and am not finding a copy on line (it is under copyright). Generally, Burnside's work emphasizes the spontaneity of life, it's unplanned nature, dependent on nature itself and relationships with other people rather than a set of rules from outside our own experience. This quotation from a critic may help you:

"Burnside's intensely lyric poems occupy a borderland between two worlds. On the one hand the earthly experience of our bodies is rendered in richly sensuous language that can sometimes tip into the visceral: "stripped flesh/and the cords/of muscle/ribbed and charred/like something barbecued". ('De Humani Corporis Fabrica'). His detailed knowledge of ecology and love of the natural world stitches his poems into the fabric of specific landscapes and locales. On the other hand his poems continually break free of the bodily and the merely personal: as he himself puts it "the lyrical impulse begins at the point of self-forgetting." (Strong Words, Bloodaxe, 2000). It is this blurred territory between the self and the other that Burnside has made particularly his own. His poems are fraught with glimpsed presences; ghosts, angels, ancestors, our own unlived lives."