If I had to be marooned on a desert island with a stranger, that stranger would be John Burnside.
Not that he’s a literary Ray Mears: I rather doubt that catching fish with his bare hands or lighting a fire without matches are among his skills. Nor would he be an easy companion, since by his own account he is a brooder and an insomniac and a craver of solitude. He is the erstwhile resident of a mental institution. He also has complicated feelings about women. But he’d be my perfect companion, still. For one thing, the isle would be full of sounds and sweet airs that give delight, because Burnside is the finest poet writing in Britain today. For another, he’s a brilliant and utterly original thinker, a stranger to received opinion given to flashes of wit and a rare genius of insight. He has read widely and well. He’d notice such interesting things about the stars and the colour of the sea that would-be rescuers would be waved away.
Burnside has written a great many books. There are 14 collections of poetry — among them winners of the T.S. Eliot and Forward prizes — as well as novels, short stories and two previous volumes of memoir. I Put a Spell on You is also autobiographical, although in the loosest sense. What it’s really about is love, bewitching, deranging and dangerous love most of all. Burnside examines the feelings which exist at what he calls the dark end of the fair, a place where glamour slips free of its current usage as a bridesmaid to fame and reverts to a darker past of enchantment. The kind of love which interests him is profoundly unsettling, the sort that makes people do and say things quite outside the scope of their usual lives.
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