To the Shakers a good song was a gift indeed the test of a song's goodness was how much of a
gift it was. In their call to 'labour to make the way of God your own' Shaker artists
expressed an aesthetic that had much in common with the old Japanese notion attributed to
Hokusai that to paint bamboo one had first to become bamboo. In his tenth collection John
Burnside begins with an interrogation of the gift song treating matters of faith and
connection the community of living creatures and the idea of a free church - where faith is
placed not in dogma or a possible credo but in the indefinable - and moves on through
explorations of time and place towards a tentative and idiosyncratic re-ligere the beginnings
of a renewal of the connection to and faith in an ordered world. The book closes with a
series of meditations on place entitled 'Four Quartets' intended both as a spiritual response
to the string quartets of Bartók and Britten (as Eliot's were to Beethoven's late quartets)
and as an experiment in the poetic form that the finest of poets the true miglior fabbro
chose as a medium for his own declaration of faith. The poems in this collection are true
gifts: thrillingly beautiful charged with power and mystery each imbued with the generous
skills of a master of his craft.
