Country Music - Will Burns

Nothing in the place meant nothing.
The poems in Country Music are observant, curious, finding everywherethey look detail worthy of notice, determined in that 'The falsehood is thatthere is little / left for us to know'. This same faith in the minutiae of theworld acknowledges the cost of our decisions, however small - that 'To feel theevening coming up / and to stream one way or another' can be the differencebetween this life and that, 'at once to feel / all these thingschange'.
From the intimately personal - the choices that lead us towards, or away from,old friends, lovers, family members and their lost and vanishing stories, tothe collective - humanity's 'bad choices piling up like debts' - Burns iseverywhere concerned with consequence and responsibility. 'The bloody mess ofindividuals - / plastic stuff outside an abandoned tent', tobacco packaging,dogshit, old newspapers, styrofoam, white goods, both blend into and stand outfrom the landscape. This is evidence of the human cost, the tent's inhabitantexisting at the margins. There are 'rubber boats in the news / and no bordersto heavy weather', the patterns of migratory birds are disrupted, and asequence 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 Texancountry singer 'on his second life', beer and bourbon and Brton cider,American primitive, Merle Haggard, Warren Zevon, marijuana and micheladas andthe shimmer of pedal steel - the coded messages of the natural world showthrough. Here is an exhortation to remake, restore, 'begging for you to buildagain - / this time something cool and that will last'.
In its evocations of doubt and responsibility, music and memory, CountryMusic is a debut of immense power from one of British poetry's mostaccomplished new voices.