Poems
Published by Listowel Writers’ Week.
Winner of the 2020 Listal Poetry Prize. Shortlisted for the An Post Irish Poem of the Year 2020.
Terminarch
For Fatu, Kenya, 2018
Girl, you’re the last combination of chromosomes
and randomly smolt genes of your species.
You wear survival on your hide like an armour
of melted-down spearheads and machetes.
You vocalize the thunderous gutterals
of your indigenous tongue into seasons of hollow,
and are last to walk the way of the pilgrims
and mates to the familial watering holes.
Your brothers crossed the Ngorongoro cradle
to the other side to join the djinn. Their fathers,
and fathers before them, travelled past
the cauldron caldera you would call home,
if free to. Their pride graces teak tresors
as polished handles of yemenese daggers,
or ground to myth in Chinese powders.
But your grandfather, as rare as rhodium
in his life, cleared the walls of hunting lodges,
reverse-engineering evolution
to a crash of poems. Like you, he was a birth
of magma from the fertile crater core.
Now receeding like lava back to the spirits,
he is a zip of unravelling DNA helix
and nucleotides you share, but have no use for.
As you search through cracks of crust and mantle
for the rest of your days, some holy place
to call your own, you lumber on a petered-out trail
of seed and sequence, relic and reason,
red dust. You are from yet also filled with volcano
and desire for something with no name, no outlet.
When the earth swallowed his last death trumpet,
deep underground an ancient herd stampeded.
Hearing it, he lowered his bullish head to charge
the rim. He knew he was storming time
to surrender to the last century of man.
You are so many things at once, a matriarch
without fold, an endling of magical code,
revered by the old ones, in lineage and bone.
And the horizon is a blood sky spilling towards
you. Fatu, you’re extinct despite still living
and we mourn the last ever male of your kind,
the northern white rhino, named Sudan,
who leaves you, granddaughter, behind him.
Irish Writers Festival McClure Poetry Prize
Green Milk
There are days I go there in my head. When the babble
and sky of lowlands fail me and I climb the tumble
of six thousand meters, breathless, in the Himalayas.
I leave the clangs of Yak bells behind me, shedding
tree lines, unlacing ravines of plunge.
I peel of millimeter by millimeter of old belief.
I lean into mountains which pull me to them
while cascades rob rock of mineral silt
and as granite and gravity remain indifferent,
I dream of that green milk churning.
I climb past prayerwheels of sun-muted pastel
as veins fill with the release of water,
torrents of cloudy rage over, under Khumbu bones.
Oxygen slides into memory. Blood thickens,
coursing. I come alive, drunk on wind-chill,
as this height. The seize of snow, china white,
smacks at seven thousand (where Boeings fly)
turns bones to glass, and heads to God, inclined.
In this place, the dying zone, the only real belief
is benevolance. Amen and apnoea are both submission.
Sagamartha is addiction. I’ve heard of men blinded,
hypnotized, torn between peak and the safe plod home.
Mesmerised by the crack of glaciers, and the need
to finally look down. Mountaineers, Sherpas alike
are marked on the moraine by stones and flags.
In scree above the Gura red Rhodedendrons, I pause.
Reverence, for the first time in my life, feels right.
Those who’ve never been here call it madness
but the hymns bursting streams are kaleidoscopic.
And if there must be religion, then let this be it.
O Bhéal Winter Warmers Festival:
Terminarch was shortlisted for An Post Irish Book Awards Poem of the Year:
Hoar Frost was a winner in the Poetry Society National Poetry Day “Vision” Competition judged by Moniza Alvi.
Publication in The Moth (Autumn 2020):
Hamish Canham Prize
Listowel Single Poem Prize
Bath Magg publication

REVIEW
“White Horses draws on a heritage of ethics and strong-mindedness that extends worldwide, through Germany and Europe to post-colonial Africa and the Himalayas, from the patriarchal and biblical past to a future where reason and the heart lie down together”. Harry Clifton
“To read Jo Burns’ poems, is to feel exhilarated and enthralled. She makes bold, unexpected leaps with language, able to mine history and place with authentic poignancy. This collection will move you, and excite too, as Burns explores the spectacular and the strange, gifting us with vivid poems to be savoured. Poetry has a new, accomplished and necessary voice”. Rebecca Goss