Gift Songs

To the Shakers, a good song was a gift; indeed the test of a song's goodness was how much of a gift it was. In their call to 'labour to make the way of God your own', Shaker artists expressed an aesthetic that had much in common with the old Japanese notion, attributed to Hokusai, that to paint bamboo, one had first to become bamboo.

In his tenth collection, John Burnside begins with an interrogation of the gift song, treating matters of faith and connection, the community of living creatur...