"Take us the little foxes (Collected poems)" by Miles Burrows (Carcanet, 2021)

Poems from 1966 to 2021. On the back cover it says "The poems are primarily conversational". Indeed, the odd poem is formatted as a script, and there's a lot of light verse. There are sonnets, many rhyming pieces, and often easy-going prose-like pieces. An early example is "minipoet", which makes a case for Minis (cars, poets) - "nippy rather than resonant" - contrasting with the older "archpoet" - "extremely well upholstered ... temperamental, wanted to show off". The ending is "most of us prefer the minipoet for the sort of journeys we make nowadays".

At the end of many of the poems I wondered "am I missing something or isn't there much to get?" Here for example are the final 4 lines of the 11 line "Difficulties with girls" - "The daughter of the school librarian/ Rode a horse along half-melting tarmac/ Towards the swimming pool and went on past/ Like general Haig looking for the Somme".

And there are lots of words. Here's part of p.36 - "And those of us who did not ask to become litterateurs,/ Poseurs, flaneurs, or entrepeneurs/ And those of us who did not ask to be/ Minor poets singing in a minor key:/ Who have waited for images with the patience/ Of the fat girl waiting for a dancing partner: Who have struggled with words/ As furniture men struggle with a grand piano, What are we to make of the whole business?". Or what about "If you are not going to/ 'Heaven' it is not because you are not good enough/ (Always assuming 'good' to be used in the way it is normally used,/ And 'because' to be used in the way in which/ It is commonly used in English"?

There's the odd striking phrase - e.g "The American satellite/ Slides over smooth as a baize-bottomed chess piece./ Silent, purposive" - but I soon decided to skim rather than read from cover to cover. My favourite piece was a later one - "Remonstrating with the moon".

"Waiting for the nightingale" by Miles Burrows (Carcanet, 2017)

About 100 pages of poems from "PN Review", "Poetry Review", "TLS", etc. Or are they poems? Carol Rumens writes "Burrows’s poem-like entities are a delight", and often they are, but they're the kind of texts I send to fiction (or creative non-fiction) magazines. She adds "His specialism is the bizarre but real, rather than the surreal, inlaid with an affectionate but sharp social observation ... In carrying the hypothesising idiom over into a field where it’s not usually found, or, at least, not so directly revealed, Burrows surprises us into amusement", pointing out his use of de-familiarisation.

Few of the poems flop completely. The style creates poems that aren't brittle - they can survive the odd duff line or two. The poems that don't work for me (e.g. "Our Neighbourhood") are instructive - they help highlight the factors that contribute to his successful pieces.

• If poems deliver good-enough one-liners fast-enough, they succeed (Some of the poems here lose momentum or have no good lines to fall back on)
• Sometimes the criteria of essays or character studies apply (some of the poems of this type don't feel that they provide decisive insight. Some over-use the defamiliarisation device)
• Sometimes poems succeed because readers will get a sense of satisfaction recognising the references ("Wallace in Underland" and "Monday Morning" rather depend on Stevens' "Sunday Morning")

His poems can survive without one of two of these ingredients, but they struggle. I like "English Provincial Poetry", "The Crocodile Skin Handbag", "The figure in the tapestry" except for the line-breaks. And I like many fragments, his name-dropping, the inconsequential details, the "long erudite divagations and calling different names" (p.94), e.g. -

• Lovers imagine Metaphysics/ To be some kind of baroque fire escape/ That lets them change the subject/ While continuing to talk about themselves (p.32)
• There are no crosswords in heaven/ Because there is no tomorrow for the answer (p.34)
• And the other half (rude but sincere)/ Was by monks scribbling in the margins./ There was nothing else to do in the fourteenth century./ Imagine it: first you're in the fourteenth century/ That's the 1300s remember)/ Then, on top of that, you're Philip Larkin in a cowl./ It's enough to make you want to spray things on trains (p.72)
• There's ice hockey on TV which Father's taken a surprising interest in./ It takes him away from his sermons (p.68)
• What is going on here? Does the poet's jocular tone/ Get on your nerves? (p.77)

Other reviews

• But those unheard (Guardian "poem of the week")