London Review Bookshop Podcast · London Review Bookshop

Michael Symmons Roberts & Hannah Westland on John Burnside

April 8, 2026·1 hr·5 clips

Discover how John Burnside's 'The Myth of the Twin' revolutionized his poetry with open, discursive forms.

The occasion is celebratory and bereaved. A warm bookshop introduction sets up the night as a chance to hear Burnside's words with him gone, with Just Out and the newly jacketed memoirs close at hand. The mood is tender, but it never turns stiff. Michael Symmons Roberts talks about Burnside as a poet who found a world early and kept returning to it, poem by poem. The recurrence feels alive rather than dutiful. A reading from The Solitary in Autumn brings that world into focus: yard, leaves, twigs, apples, canal, light, frost, and creatures coming back through dusk. The poem lingers at thresholds. Human work, seasonal rot, and a trace of the sacred gather around the small job of making a fire. The conversation does not try to turn Burnside into a statue. When one guest says the books were not the important thing, it lands as a sharper way of saying the work was bigger than the volumes. The books are traces of attention. The pull is in the images, the voice, the atmosphere, and the way the poems face endings without pinning them down. Autumn becomes a tool for thought. The closing reading moves through forgetting, kinship stories, salt rain, lantern light, and shapes that hover between woman, fox, deer, and shadow. Nobody over-explains it, which is the right choice. The speakers trust the poems and keep circling them with care. Burnside's absence stays in the room. The best passages let grief sound like listening, as if everyone is leaving a little room for the poet to answer.

As heard by us

A warm, bookish evening that lets Burnside's poems and memoirs carry the tribute.

The London Review Bookshop evening gives John Burnside a warm, measured tribute, with attention to his latest poetry collection, Just Out. Michael Simmons-Roberts and Hannah Westland guide the stage conversation, and the newly jacketed memoirs, now with fresh introductions,…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

For listeners who want a warm, reflective evening at the London Review Bookshop celebrating John Burnside's work.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from London Review Bookshop Podcast