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 ...
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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 Bart???k 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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Add this copy of Gift Songs to cart. $21.59, good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Baltimore rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Halethorpe, MD, UNITED STATES, published 2007 by Jonathan Cape.
Add this copy of Gift Songs (Cape Poetry) to cart. $83.94, new condition, Sold by GridFreed rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from North Las Vegas, NV, UNITED STATES, published 2007 by Jonathan Cape.
This is a fantastic poetry book and easily the best book I have read this year. The poems are largely meditations on aspect of religious thought and practice combined with a keen eye for natural details. They make particular reference at points to the author's scottish heritage and the free churches ("Gift Songs" itself is a Shaker reference, apparently), but never in a way that means they are exclusively for people who "get" all the references (cos I'm pretty thick and I never get all the references). Because the poems are all exploring related areas, later poems can be seen as developments of thought seen in earlier poems, which isn't always the case in poetry books. The final "Four Quartets", which manage to work on their own terms despite Eliot, are a fantastic meditation on what I'd like to call "liminal space", in that they are all particular locations but at the same time they are standing for a lot of harbours and crossings between the everyday and the eternal. I realise I'm not doing this book justice but it really does need to be read in its entirety. That said, the title of this review is the first line of a particular poem called "Prayer" and don't you want to know how it ends?
