Slow Puncture

Miles burrows, the master of humorous, oddly profound poetic ‘sketches’ and dramas, returns with a new book of what he calls ‘incidental verse’, written in England and abroad, concerned with sickness and ageing as drama, where clinical situations are reflected in a series of vignettes staged between reality and dream. The poems’ characteristically mordant observations alight on subjects from a child’s death to a shaman performing a ritual ceremony for the journey between Heaven and Earth, or the image of wheelchairs pushed under a tree by the Thai carers in a poem which dwells on how ageing people pass the day in different countries. Burrows knows that these reminiscences are in danger of falling back on their own material’s natural comedy, like a spider continually struggling to get out of an empty bathtub as one poem’s title has it. In another poem, a moorland pony stuck fast in a bog, sinking, is rescued by a team with a jeep who attach a belt round him and lug him out. These poems are second thoughts, cartoons, esprits de l’escalier, sybil’s leaves, poems at a tangent, unspoken repartees. Like sketches done in a café by a person absently rubbing his thumb into some spilt coffee...