Book review: The Music of Time, by John Burnside

The subtitle “Poetry In The Twentieth Century” might lead you to expect a historical survey, something that would have been an extraordinary undertaking, even if restricted to work first written in the English language. Inasmuch as this, or something like it, would seem to have been Burnside’s original intention, he sensibly changed tack and instead chose “to discuss poems and ideas of poetry as they inform not just ‘the life of the mind’ but also my day-to-day existence.” So we have a personal, rather than academic book, a poet’s record, examination and celebration of poems and poets who matter to him. The result is a book which is the product of remarkably wide reading and his response to this. It is perhaps a book that few will read cover to cover, but it is one which invites and deserves close reading, one also with many chapters that I would think  readers will return to again and again.