Poetry review – AS IT MUST: Colin Pink considers an interesting new collection by Gale Burns which is sometimes emotionally restrained and yet surprisingly and strikingly graphic about politics and death
As It Must
Gale Burns
Kingston University Press, 2026
ISBN 978-909362-92-5
£12.99
Gales Burns’ second collection As It Must reads rather like a memoir, reflecting on childhood memories and more recent events in a series of poetic vignettes. The poems range widely in time and space from places in England to France and Switzerland, from the distant past to recent events. For instance “Sussex” recounts memories of a car journey with his mother (a Jungian analyst) who talks, inappropriately one guesses, of ‘the frustrations / of marriage, workplace machinations, / oncoming weight and middle age’. “Paul” remembers a childhood friend who ‘was my soulmate / before I knew the word, / a thin Irish boy / from the orphanage’. One day Paul no longer appears and the narrator has no one to share the sense of loss with. In another poem the adult poet attends ‘a concert hall of wood / with unending Sibelius angst’ with an ex-partner and, in the final couplet, is ‘mistaken for the most recent ex, / a part I know how to play, consummately’. Given the musical context, the phrase ‘play, consummately’ provides a witty conclusion to the situation.
In poems such as these there is a strong feeling of anxiety, loss and isolation. These feelings are largely sub-textual, emerging between the lines of poems that are restrained in their use of language. I felt there was a danger of them being too restrained, of lapsing into prose. I often longed for the poet to allow themselves to be more adventurous in their exploration of language, to generate more surprising and inventive combinations of words, which is surely an important task for poetry, yet is something that many contemporary poets, not just Burns, refrain from doing.
Many of the poems are about family. Near the middle of the collection is a sequence called “Some Frivolous Pursuits” about the extended family of grandparents and great-aunt, who have an august pedigree. “Family” conjures up a past age:
My Grandparents are Victorians:
orchids or butterflies in the greenhouse,
striped Camellias in the garden,
junket or summer pudding
and slideshows of trips to recent colonies.
Great-Grandfather was an architect in the Arts and Craft Movement, while Grandfather was a very practical engineer :
The Routemaster bus that takes me to school,
the first tanks of the Great War,
the diesel taxis on the streets of London,
and some parts of the Spitfire
are all engines designed by Grandfather
“Great Aunt Cece” reads like a brief obituary in the newspaper. Various hints – she never married, ‘it was said, there were / no men after the Great War’, she was a suffragette and ‘she spent her last decades living with a Mary / we never met…’ –make the reader wonder if she was perhaps the unacknowledged lesbian in the family.
Several of the poems have a fine narrative quality, for instance “Aunt Anna’s Woods” tells how a group of children go into the woods at night on a hunting trip ‘…in search / of anything that moved – a hearsay adder, / or some badgers pictured in old books’. But at night the wood takes on a sinister aspect and mysterious sounds ‘a hum so deep the woodland floor of leaves // would shuffle as if a thousand little beasts / were risen from the earth’ spooks the children, who see no adder or badger but ‘were quiet with fear’.
“The Knitting Circle” indicates that far more than knitting is going on in the knitting circle:
They knitted words of disputation,
making a garment so impenetrable
it could be used by soldiers at the front
In the highly accomplished poem “Seashore”, Burns deftly links sex, death and the natural world through the repeated phrase ‘up and down’. This is used to describe first, the rhythm of intercourse, then his mother’s breathing in a hospital bed and finally the tides ‘leaving the stink of bladderwrack, // frayed rope, cuttlefish bones half-broken – / all of them longing for the sea’s swell’.
There is a more political dimension to some of the later poems. “Protest” recounts a (presumably eco) protest at Trafalgar Square where ‘Hare Krishna folk ladle free food’ and ‘A young man has glued himself to a jigsaw wooden structure’. The scene has an almost festive atmosphere until: ‘Riot Police charge, grab people and throw them aside – / their secret weapon, to never look you in the eye.’
One of the most powerful poems in the collection is “RAF Reaper Force, Lincolnshire” which is based on research by Peter Lee into the effectiveness and impact on the operatives of RAF drone forces deployed in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The operators are 4,000 miles away from their victims but can follow their movements, home in and kill them:
…a white flash
fills the screen and I can only half imagine
what this has done to his body. Next, I see
his wife leave the house. I see her scream,
her hands to her cheeks, her children rush out
and scatter; for them nothing will ever be the same.
The narrator returns home after his shift and reflects: ‘It’s a relief not to be asked How was your day, dear? / It’s a relief that no one wants to know.’ This poem is particularly resonant today, given the increasing use of drones in so many war zones (Ukraine, Sudan, Gaza and Lebanon) and especially the chilling, indiscriminate use of drone attacks by the IDF killing so many women and children in Gaza. Of course, today, anyone with a Smartphone can see, in real-time on Instagram, all too clearly, what such weapons do to a human body, if you can bear to look.
May 28 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Gale Burns
Poetry review – AS IT MUST: Colin Pink considers an interesting new collection by Gale Burns which is sometimes emotionally restrained and yet surprisingly and strikingly graphic about politics and death
As It Must
Gale Burns
Kingston University Press, 2026
ISBN 978-909362-92-5
£12.99
Gales Burns’ second collection As It Must reads rather like a memoir, reflecting on childhood memories and more recent events in a series of poetic vignettes. The poems range widely in time and space from places in England to France and Switzerland, from the distant past to recent events. For instance “Sussex” recounts memories of a car journey with his mother (a Jungian analyst) who talks, inappropriately one guesses, of ‘the frustrations / of marriage, workplace machinations, / oncoming weight and middle age’. “Paul” remembers a childhood friend who ‘was my soulmate / before I knew the word, / a thin Irish boy / from the orphanage’. One day Paul no longer appears and the narrator has no one to share the sense of loss with. In another poem the adult poet attends ‘a concert hall of wood / with unending Sibelius angst’ with an ex-partner and, in the final couplet, is ‘mistaken for the most recent ex, / a part I know how to play, consummately’. Given the musical context, the phrase ‘play, consummately’ provides a witty conclusion to the situation.
In poems such as these there is a strong feeling of anxiety, loss and isolation. These feelings are largely sub-textual, emerging between the lines of poems that are restrained in their use of language. I felt there was a danger of them being too restrained, of lapsing into prose. I often longed for the poet to allow themselves to be more adventurous in their exploration of language, to generate more surprising and inventive combinations of words, which is surely an important task for poetry, yet is something that many contemporary poets, not just Burns, refrain from doing.
Many of the poems are about family. Near the middle of the collection is a sequence called “Some Frivolous Pursuits” about the extended family of grandparents and great-aunt, who have an august pedigree. “Family” conjures up a past age:
My Grandparents are Victorians:
orchids or butterflies in the greenhouse,
striped Camellias in the garden,
junket or summer pudding
and slideshows of trips to recent colonies.
Great-Grandfather was an architect in the Arts and Craft Movement, while Grandfather was a very practical engineer :
The Routemaster bus that takes me to school,
the first tanks of the Great War,
the diesel taxis on the streets of London,
and some parts of the Spitfire
are all engines designed by Grandfather
“Great Aunt Cece” reads like a brief obituary in the newspaper. Various hints – she never married, ‘it was said, there were / no men after the Great War’, she was a suffragette and ‘she spent her last decades living with a Mary / we never met…’ –make the reader wonder if she was perhaps the unacknowledged lesbian in the family.
Several of the poems have a fine narrative quality, for instance “Aunt Anna’s Woods” tells how a group of children go into the woods at night on a hunting trip ‘…in search / of anything that moved – a hearsay adder, / or some badgers pictured in old books’. But at night the wood takes on a sinister aspect and mysterious sounds ‘a hum so deep the woodland floor of leaves // would shuffle as if a thousand little beasts / were risen from the earth’ spooks the children, who see no adder or badger but ‘were quiet with fear’.
“The Knitting Circle” indicates that far more than knitting is going on in the knitting circle:
They knitted words of disputation,
making a garment so impenetrable
it could be used by soldiers at the front
In the highly accomplished poem “Seashore”, Burns deftly links sex, death and the natural world through the repeated phrase ‘up and down’. This is used to describe first, the rhythm of intercourse, then his mother’s breathing in a hospital bed and finally the tides ‘leaving the stink of bladderwrack, // frayed rope, cuttlefish bones half-broken – / all of them longing for the sea’s swell’.
There is a more political dimension to some of the later poems. “Protest” recounts a (presumably eco) protest at Trafalgar Square where ‘Hare Krishna folk ladle free food’ and ‘A young man has glued himself to a jigsaw wooden structure’. The scene has an almost festive atmosphere until: ‘Riot Police charge, grab people and throw them aside – / their secret weapon, to never look you in the eye.’
One of the most powerful poems in the collection is “RAF Reaper Force, Lincolnshire” which is based on research by Peter Lee into the effectiveness and impact on the operatives of RAF drone forces deployed in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The operators are 4,000 miles away from their victims but can follow their movements, home in and kill them:
…a white flash
fills the screen and I can only half imagine
what this has done to his body. Next, I see
his wife leave the house. I see her scream,
her hands to her cheeks, her children rush out
and scatter; for them nothing will ever be the same.
The narrator returns home after his shift and reflects: ‘It’s a relief not to be asked How was your day, dear? / It’s a relief that no one wants to know.’ This poem is particularly resonant today, given the increasing use of drones in so many war zones (Ukraine, Sudan, Gaza and Lebanon) and especially the chilling, indiscriminate use of drone attacks by the IDF killing so many women and children in Gaza. Of course, today, anyone with a Smartphone can see, in real-time on Instagram, all too clearly, what such weapons do to a human body, if you can bear to look.