Throughout his career Burnside has sought to make literature freely available to all individuals, not merely to the interested educated, democratising the art and the opportunity for and engagement with individual, community and the arts.

Published collections of poetry can be sourced by those interested but public, visible installations make poetry available to all, offering opportunity for engagement, that would otherwise be unavailable.

Poems made visible

Whether inscribed on glass or carved into large free-standing stone and placed in a public or civic context, cultural meaning and significance is conveyed powerfully by a poem’s visibility. The sense of a shared humanity created and expressed, here for example, in Brackfield Memorial Woods Public poetry  (see below), makes affective life immediately tangible by  foregrounding soldiers’ experiences. This can lead to the formation of a two-way link through memory of past and present generations in a new and powerful way, allowing history to infiltrate directly into and live in contemporary consciousness.

Another example of this can be found in Belfast City Hall’s “Spanish Window”: This window marks the contribution of those Belfast citizens to the anti-fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War from 1936 – 1939.  About 320 Irish volunteers fought against Franco’s forces as members of the XV International Brigade. Of these, forty-eight were born in Belfast. Twelve died in Spain. The Spanish Civil War was an opportunity to stand against the growth of fascism.