While John Burnside listed The Hoop (1988) as his first book, before that collection of poems there had been Homing (1983), co-published by Richard Burns at Los Poetry Press and me at Menard Press. For this beautiful early sequence of poems, Burnside used the name John-Paul Dick.
At some point I asked John whether – for promotional reasons – we could reveal that the author was John Burnside. He immediately agreed.
Burns (now Berengarten), who was an important mentor for John, had taught him at the Cambridge College of Arts and Technology, now Anglia Ruskin University.
