My eldest son rolls over in his sleep
and, like an actor mid-soliloquy,
he murmurs, “Nothing—”

The mice are back;
                             I leave them
crusts and pine nuts

He is waiting for the story to begin:
a road through the meadows, a ship’s light, all those
signals in the grass he has to learn

Whatever I hoped to believe,
I never imagined
the pitfall of consolation:

It feels like a door in the light
through which the mind might pass at any moment,

All day, the colorless heat
of too much summer:
parcels of darkness

John Burnside’s poems evoke the other world—whatever it might be. The poems are at once lyrical and meditative, their seemingly ordinary declarations cross-stitched with spookiness; the result is a kind of vivid, autumnal intensity. We liked this…