Quote Originally Posted by romac1
It's John Burnside's precision throughout his poem that allows him to get away with a phrase like "this bungled joy."
And of course it helps that the elements of that poem crop up throughout that sequence of eleven poems. The 'rooms' and the stars en masse (sea of stars, etc) all re-appear frequently. The motif of 'gaps' especially in relation to people and their boundaries is also very common throughout his body of work. The bungled joy by then has already been approached, backed away from, discarded, embraced, and so on -- it's like defining the thing by shading in everything around it, to leave a rough outline of it. Which rather neatly fits into the book's manifesto, which searches out and attempts to identify the unknowable world vs the knowable.