In the first, and best, of his three volumes of memoirs, A Lie About My Father (2006), John Burnside describes Limbo as “the one truly great Catholic invention: a no man’s land of mystery and haunting music.” This is the world his poems have always inhabited, and Still Life with Feeding Snake, his fourteenth collection (in just under thirty years), is no different—indeed the apparent lack of development is one problem with his work.1A puzzling gap exists between the world of Burnside’s memoirs—marked by violence, alcoholism, and mental illness—and the etiolated world of the poems, which are like the thuribles of his Catholic childhood, giving off a fragrant perfume and a deliciously misty atmosphere but quickly evaporating. Or maybe it isn’t so puzzling, and the poems are a salvage operation to re-assert the place of the numinous in a difficult life, to give thanks for eventual blessings. But then there is the contrast of styles, the prose muscular and metaphorical, the poems aiming for delicacy and grace but often achieving only insipidity. Nor does Burnside always make sense, which we surely have a right to expect of a poet however difficult or obscure. What can he mean by “a vast and beatific absence,” or by “the heart/ repealed by its disdain/ for the beyond,” or by “some hint of the interspecific unpicked from the shadows”? When he comes down to earth (in a collection containing several poems about space travel) and focuses his eye, he can