Poetry review – NATURAL BURIAL GROUND: Guy Russell reflects on the hard-to-accomplish subtlety and restrained sensitivity of this new collection by Will Burns
Natural Burial Ground
Will Burns
Corsair
ISBN: ?978-1-472158-06-2
80pp £10.99
This book’s title attracted me even before I saw its author’s name: ‘natural’, with its normative slur, joined to the Gothic or archaeological ‘burial ground’. And undoubtedly, the motif here is decline, death and mourning: of narrators (‘the fidget in the heart’, the ‘slow last years’, ‘our assemblages of only just still working parts’), family (‘our lost parents’), businesses (‘their farms bust and overgrown’), towns (‘dead’ and ‘dying’), and several actual deaths. Above all, there’s the degradation of Nature: ‘the bass so small now’, ‘the butterflies […] gone’, the ‘birches are parched’, the hills ‘songless’, the trout’s ‘pink muscle spun with polymers’. Of the many birds we’d expect to find in a Will Burns collection, the most frequent here are the ominous crows. Of the similarly anticipated mentions of beer and bars: ‘rivers of ice-cold bock/ couldn’t save us now’. And the music? It’s still a consolation, though most of the musicians referenced have recently died.
A poem-title like “Headland” suggests we should read the landscapes internally as well as externally, and the general ebbing and waning extends to the speaker’s stylistic choices. This book’s not for you if you’re looking for rich sound-play, strong rhythm, figurative language, elaborate vocabulary or dramatic effects. Lines like ‘A garden on a ridge./Hedges and borders. Paths and plots and overspill.’ feel like someone making notes for a poem. The Jersey and Buckinghamshire milieux from Will Burns’ earlier work reappear shorn of syntax. Pronoun-drops (‘Woke to rain.’ ‘Feels like work…’) are common. And the note-form in turn attenuates to lists. There’s even the occasional bromide (‘tired’ hotel rooms, ‘dying’ afternoon, ‘quicksilver’ fish…) as if the speaker’s long past troubling about such things. A few of the shortest poems, like this one, do use half-rhyme, made to look almost accidental:
By the racecourse, bell heather.
Sphagnum moss, marsh harrier –
quarters first then breezes off clear
past the clubhouse and disappears.
(“Coast History”)
The other new feature is the reticence. There’s a poem, for instance, about a ceramic plate in the corner of a bar, which ends, ‘Nothing blue about it. Not in here.’ It looks like a private joke about the landlady’s aversion to perhaps a certain (brand of) football team, music, politics or even impropriety – but there’s no way for us to know or be included. In fact, the family and relationship elements are so walled off that the reader’s left scrabbling at the brickwork. The narrator teases us with single-reference characters (‘Uncle Kevin’, ‘your brother’), specific-sounding but undiscoverable settings and unfinished or blurry situations, and then cuts in the same way as he cuts the syntax. Where he does admit to fiercer feelings, he takes refuge in conventional locutions (‘a heart in shock’). In consequence, many poems struggle to overcome the so-what test; they begin hesitantly, they keep distant, they lack movement, and they end with wilful flatness.
This all makes it sound like the book is depressing, dull, or even badly written. I’d normally have countenanced this last possibility: sometimes highly-praised poets do start to believe the hype and become careless and indulgent, and the results show it. But Will Burns’ previous publications show him an uncommonly subtle and sensitive operator, as well as a risk-taking one. So I’m inclined to think this a ‘bold’ (to indulge that word so beloved of us reviewers) attempt at something technically very hard to carry off: it’s inhabiting that ultra-contemporary headland of incessant and unstoppable ecological, economic, social and personal decline, embodying a downbeat, unflashy speaker like an old friend sunk by powerlessness, shutting down intimacy, close to the point of refusing to care anymore because caring hurts. The bad news is relentless, but your friend is still just about capable of his former vivacity (the distant lights that ‘salt the stars’, say). His companionship and conversation in itself may not bring you solace or cheer; what might do is if he feels the same way as you.
May 30 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Will Burns
Poetry review – NATURAL BURIAL GROUND: Guy Russell reflects on the hard-to-accomplish subtlety and restrained sensitivity of this new collection by Will Burns
This book’s title attracted me even before I saw its author’s name: ‘natural’, with its normative slur, joined to the Gothic or archaeological ‘burial ground’. And undoubtedly, the motif here is decline, death and mourning: of narrators (‘the fidget in the heart’, the ‘slow last years’, ‘our assemblages of only just still working parts’), family (‘our lost parents’), businesses (‘their farms bust and overgrown’), towns (‘dead’ and ‘dying’), and several actual deaths. Above all, there’s the degradation of Nature: ‘the bass so small now’, ‘the butterflies […] gone’, the ‘birches are parched’, the hills ‘songless’, the trout’s ‘pink muscle spun with polymers’. Of the many birds we’d expect to find in a Will Burns collection, the most frequent here are the ominous crows. Of the similarly anticipated mentions of beer and bars: ‘rivers of ice-cold bock/ couldn’t save us now’. And the music? It’s still a consolation, though most of the musicians referenced have recently died.
A poem-title like “Headland” suggests we should read the landscapes internally as well as externally, and the general ebbing and waning extends to the speaker’s stylistic choices. This book’s not for you if you’re looking for rich sound-play, strong rhythm, figurative language, elaborate vocabulary or dramatic effects. Lines like ‘A garden on a ridge./Hedges and borders. Paths and plots and overspill.’ feel like someone making notes for a poem. The Jersey and Buckinghamshire milieux from Will Burns’ earlier work reappear shorn of syntax. Pronoun-drops (‘Woke to rain.’ ‘Feels like work…’) are common. And the note-form in turn attenuates to lists. There’s even the occasional bromide (‘tired’ hotel rooms, ‘dying’ afternoon, ‘quicksilver’ fish…) as if the speaker’s long past troubling about such things. A few of the shortest poems, like this one, do use half-rhyme, made to look almost accidental:
By the racecourse, bell heather. Sphagnum moss, marsh harrier – quarters first then breezes off clear past the clubhouse and disappears. (“Coast History”)The other new feature is the reticence. There’s a poem, for instance, about a ceramic plate in the corner of a bar, which ends, ‘Nothing blue about it. Not in here.’ It looks like a private joke about the landlady’s aversion to perhaps a certain (brand of) football team, music, politics or even impropriety – but there’s no way for us to know or be included. In fact, the family and relationship elements are so walled off that the reader’s left scrabbling at the brickwork. The narrator teases us with single-reference characters (‘Uncle Kevin’, ‘your brother’), specific-sounding but undiscoverable settings and unfinished or blurry situations, and then cuts in the same way as he cuts the syntax. Where he does admit to fiercer feelings, he takes refuge in conventional locutions (‘a heart in shock’). In consequence, many poems struggle to overcome the so-what test; they begin hesitantly, they keep distant, they lack movement, and they end with wilful flatness.
This all makes it sound like the book is depressing, dull, or even badly written. I’d normally have countenanced this last possibility: sometimes highly-praised poets do start to believe the hype and become careless and indulgent, and the results show it. But Will Burns’ previous publications show him an uncommonly subtle and sensitive operator, as well as a risk-taking one. So I’m inclined to think this a ‘bold’ (to indulge that word so beloved of us reviewers) attempt at something technically very hard to carry off: it’s inhabiting that ultra-contemporary headland of incessant and unstoppable ecological, economic, social and personal decline, embodying a downbeat, unflashy speaker like an old friend sunk by powerlessness, shutting down intimacy, close to the point of refusing to care anymore because caring hurts. The bad news is relentless, but your friend is still just about capable of his former vivacity (the distant lights that ‘salt the stars’, say). His companionship and conversation in itself may not bring you solace or cheer; what might do is if he feels the same way as you.