We do not need to be heroes to save the world; all we need is humility, a critical view of the commercial… — John Burnside Copy Share Image
Our response to the world is essentially one of wonder, of confronting the mysterious with a sense, not of being small, or… — John Burnside Copy Share Image
There is a red sandy beach in the Minas Basin in Nova Scotia that is unlike any other shore landscape I have… — John Burnside Copy Share Image
Snow isn't just pretty. It also cleanses our world and our senses, not just of the soot and grime of a Fife… — John Burnside Copy Share Image
High Alpine meadows, like their near relatives prairie, desert and certain varieties of wetland, teach us to consider the world from a… — John Burnside Copy Share Image
I don't want to suggest that matrimony was necessarily a tragic affair - some of our neighbours' marriages seemed quite functional, if… — John Burnside Copy Share Image
For a bird, especially for the more musically inventive, song is the defining characteristic, the primary way by which it knows itself… — John Burnside Copy Share Image
Anyone who has ever stopped to watch a hawk in flight will know that this is one of the natural world's most… — John Burnside Copy Share Image
As a child, I was consumed with a near-obsessive curiosity about what the world felt like for other creatures. — John Burnside Copy Share Image
I'm interested in the way language is used to navigate the world around us. — John Burnside Copy Share Image
A modern arboretum brings us that ancient forest and, with it, a changed apprehension of time, a renewed appreciation of the elegance… — John Burnside Copy Share Image
In many traditions, hawks are sacred: Apollo's messengers for the Greeks, sun symbols for the ancient Egyptians and, in the case of the Lakota… — John Burnside Copy Share Image
The poem builds in my mind and sits there, as if in a register, until the poem, or a piece of a longer poem,… — John Burnside Copy Share Image
Usually, I would mistrust a book if it took that long to write. Usually, if it isn't done in two years, I suspect there's… — John Burnside Copy Share Image
This is a truth that should be repeated like a mantra: to have any chance of a ful - filling life, we require not… — John Burnside Copy Share Image
My father was one of those men who sit in a room and you can feel it: the simmer, the sense of some unpredictable… — John Burnside Copy Share Image
“There are days when that dark face is something I can think of as a friend – a primal energy that carries me forward… — John Burnside Copy Share Image
I remember how, back in the 1980s, the Scottish Flow Country became an object of bemused controversy as rich celebrities and businessmen from south… — John Burnside Copy Share Image
The great pleasure that comes from reading poets such as Mark Doty and Marianne Moore is the realisation that the essential virtues - compassion,… — John Burnside Copy Share Image
I remember a nightfall from childhood, far from home and off the known track: I'd been walking with some older boys, but they ran… — John Burnside Copy Share Image
One day I was talking about what I was going to do next, and just found myself announcing it: 'I'm going to write a… — John Burnside Copy Share Image
'The Asylum Dance' was written after I'd moved back to Scotland and was a response to moving to my old home area of Fife. — John Burnside Copy Share Image
