Abstract
Burnsides engagement with a modernist aesthetics of order in his poetics of place leads into a thesis on world-making that animates and renews our feeling for the earth. I focus on the way that mutability is essential, in Gift Songs, for a humanist intelligibility of our habitus, before turning to Burnside’s poetic translation of the varieties of religious experience. Lyricism here transcends speciesist personhood to invite a cool and fresh consideration of the planet’s nuances over time.
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Notes
For more on this contextual aspect, see Bristow, T. (2011). Materialism as Cultural Ecology in John Burnside’s ‘Four Quartets’, Scottish Literary Review, 3 (2), 149–170.
For fuller accounts of Heideggerian poetics, see Guignon, C. (2001). Being as Appearing: Retrieving the Greek Experience of Phusis, in G. Fried, & R. Polt (Eds.), A Companion to Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics, New Haven: Yale University Press;
Rorty, R. (1993). Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Reification of Language, in C. B. Guignon (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger (2nd ed., pp. 337–357), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press;
Mathews, F. (2009). Introduction: Invitation to Ontopoetics, Philosophy Activism Nature, 6, 1–7.
For Henri Lefebvre, cities are situations: a present and immediate reality, a practico-material and architectural fact’ to be made distinct from ‘the urban, a social reality made up of relations which are to be conceived of, constructed or reconstructed by thought’; Lefebvre, H. (1996). Writings on Cities, (E. Kofman, & E. Lebas, Eds.) Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
See Mathews, F. (1991). The Ecological Self, London: Routledge;
Mathews, F. (2009). Introduction: Invitation to Ontopoetics, Philosophy Activism Nature, 6, 1–7.;
Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology, Ayelsbury: Intertext;
Shepard, P. (1978). Thinking Animals: Animals and the Development of Human Consciousness, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
Independently of Carl Lange, James discovered that ‘perception triggers visceral changes that are then appraised cognitively and labeled as emotions’; Nathanson, D. L. (1996). Introduction, in D. L. Nathanson (Ed.), Knowing Feeling: Affect, Script and Psychotherapy, New York: W.W. Norton.
Heidegger, M. (1962). On the Way to Language, (P. D. Hertz, Trans.) London: Harper Row. Scholars in critical animal studies disregard Heidegger’s work on animals for its sense of a rigid hierarchy between the species.
See Brown, A. (2011). Finding the Lit Space: Reality, Imagination, and the Commonplace, in the Poetry of John Burnside, Agenda, 45 (4), 101–111.
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Bristow, T. (2015). Gift Songs. In: The Anthropocene Lyric: An Affective Geography of Poetry, Person, Place. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137364753_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137364753_3
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