Students often seem to struggle with this poem, perhaps because of its erratic and chaotic versification, perhaps because it is hard to pin down what the poet is trying to say. For me though, it evokes feelings which run deeper than a surface understanding of poetic intentions or themes.

Perhaps this is because of where the poem is set. Not only is the poem set on a specific date – September 2001 – which of course makes us expect that the poem will be musings on the horrific events of 9/11 – but it is also set in a particular place. The West Sands in St Andrews was the scene for many rambles with friends, and even romantic walks with my boyfriend (now husband of 26 years), while I was at university. The wild beauty of it, its cold, grey linear austerity, strips of sky, sea, beach and land, stay with me as more than a memory. It is the physicality of where the poem is set, in this landscape, one that is well known to me, which has helped me understand it; it is key to my interpretation of the poem. Truthfully, I have not read enough to know how close that is to others’ ideas of what is being discussed, but the geography of St Andrews’ West Sands seems to me to reflect the ideas at the heart of the poem.

Burnside writes about the in-between: the spaces between reality and imagination – ‘between the world we own/and what we dream about’; between life and living – ‘finding evidence of life’ – and fear and death – ‘dizzy with the fear of losing everything’. The beach where the narrator is playing with his son is a strip of sand between the sea and the land. It is also sandwiched between two places – Leuchars and St Andrews. It seems to me that, in the poem, St Andrews represents the academic, the philosophical, and Leuchars represents war, destruction and death. Leuchars is the site of an RAF station where pilots learn to fly as they have to in war. The line ‘that gasoline smell from Leuchars gusting across the golf links’ reminds us of the terrible events of 9/11. Even when we are taken deep into the details of the sea and the beach, the ‘petrol blue’ of the jellyfish remind us of the RAF uniform, bringing us back to the terrorist events, war and destruction. St Andrews is a town with an ancient university, a seat of learning since 1413. It is where Burnside is a lecturer. The tight versification, its formality and philosophical considerations in the lines ‘At times I think what makes us who we are…’ bring us to St Andrews, the formal, traditional, erudite university town. Pressed in on both sides of the West Sands, the military might of RAF Leuchars at one end of the beach and the esoteric ideological university at the other, the poet finds himself in the middle. He is in-between the hard realities of the effects and consequences of terrorism and the abstract thoughts of academia.

The West Sands is also, of course, in-between the land and the sea. The semantic field of the sea, its tides and marine life, run through the whole poem. From the prosaic events of a child ‘gathering shells’ to the metaphorical language used to describe how we relate to others – ‘the drift and tug of other bodies’, the images of the sea are everywhere. These natural images, in the events of the poem and in so many images throughout, link us to the title of the poem. It seems that the history Burnside is talking about is not only the historic events of the news – the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers in New York – but also the history of the natural world. The ‘quiet local forms of history’ in nature’s collision with humanity. Even in its wildest state, nature is not cosy or pure. 

‘snail shells; shreds of razorfish; smudges of weed and flesh on tideworn stone’

The sibilance of this line – apparently listing things little Lucas is finding on the beach – creates a sense of uneasiness. The feel of this nature is sharp (‘razor’), tattered (‘shreds’ ‘tideworn’) and destructive (‘smudges of …flesh’). Even the opening image of ‘sand spinning off in ribbons along the beach’ – something the cold Fife wind often achieves on that exposed coast – is an image of exposure, of bleakness. The imagery of fish captured in human structures towards the end of the poem, has a positivity to it but also the sense of enclosure and confinement; the carp are ‘bright’ and ‘gold’ but they are still ‘captive’ and unable to sleep. This idea is mirrored elsewhere in the poem: ‘though we are confined by property/ what tethers us to gravity and light…’ We are confined and tethered, but to light, not to darkness.

So, the sea on one side contrasts with all that is beyond on the other side of the beach.  What then, does the beach represent? That seems to me to be the personal, the poet’s family life, the little details of his ordinary life. The image of the child in this poem links to innocence: ‘a child’s first nakedness’. Simultaneously, I feel the beach is simply where he finds himself, in-between the great events of life, looking at the details, at this ‘gazed-upon and cherished world’. It is in the minuteness of the observation, the ‘local’ things around us, that our own personal history is to be recorded.

The poem deals in ambiguity and contrasts: between confinement and freedom, of the ‘world we own’ and the one ‘we dream about’; between history recorded in great world events which shape the future and the small, observed details of nature; between the beauty and austerity of the natural world and its combining with the human which restricts yet gives hope and light.

The geography of the poem is written in every line. It is in the military Leuchars and its relation to seismic world events and in the abstract ideas of the academic St Andrews. It is in the sea, nature and how we interact with it, and in the beach where we live and play and hope. The poet is ‘reading from the book of silt and tides’ to tell us our history is in all the elements of our lives.  The poet wonders about ‘who we are’ and thinks we are ‘lost between the world we own and what we dream about’. He is ‘dizzy with the fear of losing everything’ yet the feeling the poem transmits isn’t just of ‘muffled dread’ but of brightness, innocence and hope.