Scottish - Writer | March 19, 1955 -
I moved south when I was 11 years old, moved to England. I've lived in all kinds of places, all parts of England.
John Burnside
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I really like to try my hand at everything, and I think it's probably dangerous to let oneself be pigeon-holed, not necessarily by other people, but in one's own mind.
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The way I mainly use the Internet is keeping in touch with poets that live far away. My main interest is contemporary American poets and some Spanish language poets, and I keep in touch with their work through either their websites or email.
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I realised I'd spent a lot of time in my poetry trying to find a way of talking about that whereof we cannot speak.
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For a bird, especially for the more musically inventive, song is the defining characteristic, the primary way by which it knows itself and is known by others. To lose its species song is to lose not just its identity but some part of its presence in the world.
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High Alpine meadows, like their near relatives prairie, desert and certain varieties of wetland, teach us to consider the world from a fresh perspective, to open our eyes and take account of what we have missed, reminding us that, in spite of our emphasis on the visual in everyday speech, we see so very little of the world.
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As a child, I was consumed with a near-obsessive curiosity about what the world felt like for other creatures.
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As attractive as it is, the idea that nature can exist beyond our dangerous 'instinct for happiness' is never the whole story.
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With all the goodwill and local initiative in the world, we are not about to rewild anything until we change our way of thinking about our place in the creaturely world.
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The son of a Fife mining town sledder of coal-bings, bottle-forager, and picture-house troglodyte, I was decidedly urban and knew little about native fauna, other than the handful of birds I saw on trips to the beach or Sunday walks.
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The great pleasure that comes from reading poets such as Mark Doty and Marianne Moore is the realisation that the essential virtues - compassion, wonder, humility, respect for the mysterious - are far from conventionally heroic.
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As a child, I read a great many books in which animals and birds played significant roles, not only in the narrative itself, but also in creating the emotional and psychological atmosphere of that narrative - the imaginative furniture, as it were, in which any story unfolds.
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