‘It was suddenly hard winter’: John Burnside’s Crossings

Abstract

John Burnside’s poetry and fiction presents the reader with an awkward, uncanny sense of Being. It achieves this through forcing on the reader moments of suspension—epoché in the sense given this word by German phenomenologist Edmund Husserl—which both present and enact shifts in perception of the relationship between self and other, subject and world, memory and the past, which discomforts in its suspension of narrative time as it opens up a phenomenological apperception of Being through the multiple figure of the act of crossing—between past and present, self and other, memory and forgetfulness. In each example there is an irreversible transformation of human understanding that foregrounds the condition of Being in its materiality.

Keywords

• Burnside (John)
• crossings
• deconstruction
• époché
• otherness
• phenomenology