John Burnside is the winner of the David Cohen Prize for Literature. Ruin, Blossom is a remarkable new collection exploring ageing, mortality and environmental destruction. We’re delighted to share four poems from this striking new collection here at BooksfromScotland.

Extract taken from Ruin, Blossom
By John Burnside
Published by Vintage

ON THE CLICHÉ  

Alone at last, I wanted something lovely to re-use
and care for, hours of maintenance
and finish, and the sense of déjà vu
that comes of being true to what we know. 

Lovely as sleep is lovely to the one who lies awake till
morning, trying not
to try, until
the otherness bleeds in
and gardens blaze
with something more than light, 

the way, in Mediaeval
paintings, when the Angel comes to rest,
the trees, the fruits,
the swallows in the eaves
are brightened from within, and each least thing,
because, and not in spite of what it seems,
is all it is, and all Annunciation. 

PRAYER (#1) 

Deliver me from nothing, save the thrill
of perish; place my next breath on the scales
as counterweight to all I know of guile.
Let nothing be so precious as to
linger through a night of summer rain,
when everything is cleansed: the heart, the tongue,
the love of ruins, kinship, wildering;
and let me not forget the scintillance
of new snow in the trees
by Brewster’s Yard,
beech mast on the farm roads
flecked with ice, that constant
singing in the fence wire, like the hum
that lingers on, when storyline is done.
Shelter me now, but send me on my way
at daybreak, when the town I could have loved
is locked in sleep, too perfect to recall:
shuttered kiosks, windows bleared with dew,
house martins threading the streets
in the fretwork of dawn. 

PRAYER (#2) 

Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?
Rilke 

We could cry out now, but no one would ever hear
above the sound of rain against the windows,
trains in the underworld, lit streets filling with traffic.
So let us be skilled in mourning, like the shades
who venture from the earth on days like this,
faces we know amongst the apparitions, voices
calling through the mist, as if they sensed
how close we are to lost, the harvest
squandered, and that cold light on the fields
so unforeseen, before the moon comes up,
it pains us, drained, and distant from a world
we would have set aside, had we been blessed:
the old machinery gone down to dust,
our fathers buried, roofbeams full of stars. 

AFTER SENECA  

quos amor verus tenuit, tenebit
Seneca the Younger 

The heart is not intact.
It never was. 

It founders
in the provinces 

of Thou, a ransacked
treasury of Lost 

and Found, an ancient
bonfire in the gap between 

two borders, windfall
plums and month-long 

nowdrifts in the schoolyard, where
not You nor I remains 

to listen,
till the sway of what is heard 

unspools by slow degrees
from what is not. 

Ruin, Blossom by John Burnside is published by Vintage, priced £13.