To the Shakers, a good song was a gift; indeed the test of a song's
goodness was how much of a gift it was. In their call to 'labour to
make the way of God your own', Shaker artists expressed an
aesthetic that had much in common with the old Japanese notion,
attributed to Hokusai, that to paint bamboo, one had first to
become bamboo. In his tenth collection, John Burnside begins with
an interrogation of the gift song, treating matters of faith and
connection, the community of living creatures and the idea of a
free church - where faith is placed, not in dogma or a possible
credo, but in the indefinable - and moves on through explorations
of time and place, towards a tentative and idiosyncratic re-ligere,
the beginnings of a renewal of the connection to, and faith in, an
ordered world. The book closes with a series of meditations on
place, entitled 'Four Quartets', intended both as a spiritual
response to the string quartets of Bartok and Britten (as Eliot's
were to Beethoven's late quartets), and as an experiment in the
poetic form that the finest of poets, the true miglior fabbro,
chose as a medium for his own declaration of faith. The poems in
this collection are true gifts: thrillingly beautiful, charged with
power and mystery, each imbued with the generous skills of a master
of his craft.
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