“The Death Issue” December 2015 1

something too fixed and too rigid in how we look at the natural world, which is all of the
world. And I'm really intrigued. It's not creating and finding new stuff that changes your
view of the world, it's like going back to something and saying 'ah, that's what he meant
by this', you know, Rousseau, Novalis, or Goethe, whoever. You write something and you
fit it in to your sympathies at that time. And mostly antipathies. It's more of, I liked Blake
when I was a teenager because Blake was kind of anti-Newton and I liked that -
OV: being messianic, his own unique vision, he created his own mythology
JB: yeah, though I don't like his mythology either! [laughs] just that he was anti-Newton.
No, I like some of it obviously. So, it's kind of, it's interesting, to try to purify the language.
It's also trying to clean the waters you're swimming in, you know, trying to renew your
milieu, renew your habitat.
OV: by locating yourself in these people? Yeah. I wonder if – and I'm trying not to sling
mud – but we get used to a poetry that's kind of accessible, it's a very plain language,
it's locked in a poet's memories, and it's this “memory” poetry, whereas yours seem
more interrogative, and it's not embarrassed about using these quotations, these
references, being more obscure, being more mystical. Is that something you're doing,
reacting consciously against a more accessible poetry?
JB: I'm not reacting against anything I don't think, but I'm probably in favour of something
which wasn't much in favour at one point, and is now more so, though I disagree with
how it is. I was just talking about this the other day, actually, reminiscing about the last
however many years, and it goes back to the 90s, I remember the 90s. Sarah Maguire and I
were being interviewed by someone on the radio, and I remember thinking oh this is all
about poetry and gardens, poetry and nature, poetry etc, and Sarah and I were trying to
point out that there's something very much more important going on, that it wasn't just
about poets in the garden, it was about a new way of – not new exactly, strictly speaking -,
but a way of looking at the world around us and informed by certain principles, in which
now tend to be called 'eco-poetic'. But what's happened now is anybody who writes about
trees, that sort of thing, then suddenly that's eco-poetic because they're writing about the
subject matter. But that's not what matters. You can be poetic writing about a scooter,
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