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.