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Country Music
Paperback
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- Book Synopsis
- Nothing in the place meant nothing. The poems in Country Music are observant, curious, finding everywhere they look detail worthy of notice, determined in that 'The falsehood is that there is little / left for us to know'. This same faith in the minutiae of the world acknowledges the cost of our decisions, however small - that 'To feel the evening coming up / and to stream one way or another' can be the difference between this life and that, 'at once to feel / all these things change'. From the intimately personal - the choices that lead us towards, or away from, old friends, lovers, family members and their lost and vanishing stories, to the collective - humanity's 'bad choices piling up like debts' - Burns is everywhere concerned with consequence and responsibility. 'The bloody mess of individuals - / plastic stuff outside an abandoned tent', tobacco packaging, dogshit, old newspapers, styrofoam, white goods, both blend into and stand out from the landscape. This is evidence of the human cost, the tent's inhabitant existing at the margins. There are 'rubber boats in the news / and no borders to heavy weather', the patterns of migratory birds are disrupted, and a sequence of poems explores the poet's grandmother, displaced after the war, like a castaway, to 'some welcome or unwelcome or indifferent port.' Quietly, insistently - against a ground of Chet Baker's trumpet, a Texan country singer 'on his second life', beer and bourbon and Brêton cider, American primitive, Merle Haggard, Warren Zevon, marijuana and micheladas and the shimmer of pedal steel - the coded messages of the natural world show through. Here is an exhortation to remake, restore, 'begging for you to build again - / this time something cool and that will last'. In its evocations of doubt and responsibility, music and memory, Country Music is a debut of immense power from one of British poetry's most accomplished new voices.
- About The Author
- Will was born in London and lives in Buckinghamshire. He didn't finish his English degree, choosing instead to start an ill-fated band with his brother. He likes sports, gardening and birds and is Poet-In-Residence at Caught By The River. He was named as one of the four Faber New Poets for 2014 with his debut pamphlet, praised in the Guardian for its 'quiet intelligence and subtle ways of seeing'. His second pamphlet was published as part of the Clutag Press 5 Poems series in early 2016, and Germ Songs, a series of poems illustrated by Jess White, was published by Rough Trade Books in 2019. Also in 2019, he released the album Chalk Hill Blue, a collaborative work with the composer Hannah Peel, which set a number of his poems to her music.
- Product Details
-
- ISBN
- 9781916015913
- Format
- Paperback
- Publisher
- Offord Road Books, (02 April 2020)
- Weight
- 87 grams
- Language
- English
- Dimensions
- 198 x 129 x 6 mm
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