Snow light and shadows: reflections on learning and loss

Alumni Relations

Tuesday 16 July 2024

Dr Samantha Clark (PhD 2017) is a visual artist, writer and artist’s writing coach based in the Orkney Islands and working internationally. She was supervised throughout her PhD at St Andrews by the late Professor John Burnside.

I was taken by surprise by the sadness I felt when I heard that the poet, essayist, novelist, memoirist, teacher and academic John Burnside had died aged 69. After all, we had hardly been in direct touch since I completed my PhD back in 2017. A busy and eminent man, I didn’t presume a friendship beyond our professional one. And yet the news stopped me in my tracks with a wave of regret at his loss.

John was my doctoral supervisor at the University of St Andrews. While it’s true that he wasn’t exactly prompt at answering emails, and that at times we talked at cross-purposes, over the six years we worked together we shared many long, free-ranging conversations in his book-stuffed office, about writing, philosophy, art, and life in my adopted home of Orkney, a place he knew and loved too. I missed those enriching conversations when I passed my viva, received my doctorate, and left St Andrews behind for good. I am sad that we will never share another one now.

Samantha Clark at graduation in 2017

The spaces between things

I had been over the moon when John responded with enthusiasm to my first tentative email, way back in 2010, asking him out of the blue if he’d be interested in supervising a rather woolly Creative Writing PhD proposal on how we seek meaning in the ‘spaces between things’. In the years that followed he was the first reader of early drafts of what would later become my book The Clearing. He trusted me more than I trusted myself as I rode out the ups and downs of doctoral work.

He saw me as a writer. His warm encouragement was grounded in a firm rigour I could trust to tell me the truth. And so, I began to dare see myself as a writer too. In that, he changed my life.

Snow light and eye-gleam

I would like to share with you why I wanted to work with John in the first place, why I was overjoyed when he agreed to supervise my PhD, why I was, and always remained, a bit starstruck, a bit amazed, to have him read and comment on my own writing so carefully.

It was his poetry. It was the sensation his poems always leave me with; a heightened awareness of something half-hidden, behind and between the visible things of this world, a bright mystery, lit by snow light and the eye-gleam of owls, rustling with ghosts and the flight of small birds, a numinous magic right in the midst of the ordinary.

There are so many poems I could choose from. He was prolific.

But I’ll go with this one, from the collection Gift Songs

XI LARES

All afternoon I have heard you

going from room to room, as if you would offer

the gift of a watchful presence, the gift of a look

to how the sunlight gathers in the folds

of curtains

                  how the shadows on the wall

flit back and forth, more sparrow, or swallow in flight

than birds would have been.

Like you I have felt it today, that space in our house

where doors might swing open

                                                     messengers appear:

the curve of a bowl, or the red in a vase of carnations

softly assuming the forms of a visitation.

We go for weeks and never catch ourselves

like this, the trace of magic we possess

locked in the work of appearing, day after day,

in the world of our making;

we go for months, with phantoms in our heads

till, filling a bath, or fetching the laundry in,

we see ourselves again, at home, illumined,

folding a sheet, or pouring a glass of milk,

bright in the here and now, and unencumbered.

John Burnside, Gift Songs (Cape Poetry, 2007)

Revisiting the poem now, I am brought up short by it.

When there’s more time

I recognise that I have been, for weeks now, ‘locked in the work of appearing…in the world of my making’, a world of emails and invoices, plans and to-do lists, online calendars and Zoom meetings and bank statements and web browsers, a world of horror in the news, of noisy phantoms in my head, of scattered, shallow attention and hurried notes to ‘come back this to later’.

Later, when there’s more time.

So much striving. So much worrying.

I have been forgetting to trust myself. To trust the work. To notice what emerges in the gaps, the ‘spaces between’, to pay attention to what can be glimpsed in them, when I just stop trying so hard. When I stop talking and thinking and planning and just listen.

Thank you, John, for your reminder that shy and precious things emerge when we become still and quiet. You may be gone, but your gift songs remain.

For that, I am grateful.