Judges’ Comments 

The word that sings most yearningly in Apostasy is ‘nothing.’ We might have met that particular nothing in an older essay, where John Burnside speaks, in a flurry of tender, reticent dependent clauses, about the lovers at a point of their separation by death being granted a glimpse of “an extraordinary nothing that steadies the world.” The pamphlet explores the possibilities of disavowals and negations; yet the poetry’s effect is a manifestation of various miraculous presences, whether in the shimmer of the optative or in the radiance of the counterfactual. Perhaps apostasy should be understood simply as standing away, a step out of oneself, a viewpoint that allows seeing both the touching fiction of what there is and an ambiguous glory of what could have been.

 

A Footnote to Colossians

For ye are dead, and your life is hid

St Paul

 

Let us remember

the stillborn: how they

 

cede their places here

with such good grace

 

that no one ever

speaks of them

 

again.

In school,

 

we placed them, carefully,

in Limbo,

 

deep in the folds of smoke

and snowfall, where

 

their names would never

find them:

 

pagan, now,

and immaterial,

 

like phantoms,

or that

 

boy I sometimes saw

in polaroids,

 

the one they said

was me.