John Burnside is not only a great novelist but also the most significant contemporary Scottish poet. Burnside's poetry deals with simple events: a harbor scene, a train journey, animals darting through the light of headlights. His reflections on nature, whether it's water landscapes in Scotland or the song of a blackbird, pose questions about the mystery of existence, expressed in an unobtrusive tone. With a lucid, radiant language, Burnside explores in his poems the invisible space between things at the threshold of the unheard.