Take us the Little Foxes: Collected Poems

By Miles Burrows

The poetry of Miles Burrows was discovered in 1966 when Tom Maschler, already an editor at Cape, heard him give a public reading in London. Cape published him. After that, Burrows continued his life in many walks, most of them medical. Having studied Greats at Oxford, he determined to become an intellectual and learned to smoke black Russian cigarettes, reviewing occasionally for the New Statesman. He worked as a GP and then as a psychiatrist. He was briefly a trawlerman, then a doctor in the New Guinea Highlands, in the American Hospital for Hmong tribe refugees on the Thai-Laos border, in a Catholic mission Hospital in Eastern Taiwan, in the Middle East and in Suffolk.This Collected Poems is a rich harvest from the decades between 1966 and 2021. The poems are primarily conversational. The poet is keen to get into exclusive places he has no right to be clubs, social strata, religions. Much of the adventure, the disrupted narrative, has to do with being out of place. Its long narratives work as a trawlerman in Iceland, a traditional funeral in Taiwan open on worlds that are made vertiginously real.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Oct 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781800171428

Miles Burrows

Miles Burrows is a poet always in love, and confused – as lovers tend to be – by the inconstant nature of ‘the other’. In this, his second book of poems, published half a century after the first (A Vulture’s Egg, 1966), he is also aware, merrily for the most part, of mortality. Eros and Thanatos tap at his funny bone. Does God exist? he asks. Will the nightingale, the one right nightingale, sing? The landscapes of these poems are drawn from the Far East, New Guinea and the Home Counties, where Burrows has served as a doctor, psychiatrist and a teacher. Thematically the poems build on Burrows’s eccentric childhood in a vanished but vividly reimagined, even re-invented England, rich in voices, disappointments and epiphanies and always maintaining a dialogue – now mischievous, now outrageous – with the present. The reader gratefully turns the pages, hoping the conversation will continue well beyond the back cover. // 'I’m proud to declare myself your fan. More a Mercedes than a minipoet.' Julian Mitchell. // 'Your writing amused me greatly.' Anthony Powell