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: 9781800171404

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

Book preview

MILES BURROWS

Take Us the

Little Foxes

collected poems

CARCANET POETRY

For Michael

‘Principles, Schopenhauer…all that’s nonsense! I’ve got my special 10,000 in the bank.

Melancholy! Noble anguish! Inexpressible grief! Only one thing’s lacking. I should write poetry.’

Anton Chekhov

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

A VULTURE’S EGG (1966)

Economics

Minipoet

Criticism

Family Business

Death of a Climber

Conversation in Avalon

The Quest

Oxford Poetry

Song of Father Malacostrax

Small Part

Living on the Tottenham Court Road

The Visit

The Profession

Kropotkin

Exchange Therapy

Skyros 1

Skyros 2 (tired of looking for Rupert Brooke’s grave)

Menelaos at Aulis

Odysseus

Tantum Religio

Two Poplars at Binsey

Cathedral by Gaudi

The Non-Awarding of the Newdigate Prize

Mask from Nicobar

Troy

Trotmer and Whitethorn

Fragment of a letter from Helen to Teiresias

Chanson Domestique

Detective Story

Postcard from Greece

Lunch with the Registrar

Terminal Ward

Pannychion

The IMZA Urn

Mergrove Street

Miss Apsley

Tomi Revisited (from the Russian original by Leonid Martinov)

Last of the arrogant Latinists

Apprentice in the Garden of Contingency

Lines for the grave of a linguistic philosopher

ICELANDIC JOURNAL

Icelandic Journal

At Sea

First watch

Two a.m.

Hauling in

Hauling in (2)

Appendix: Fragments

WAITING FOR THE NIGHTINGALE (2017)

English provincial poetry

Out of Dewar

Waiting for the nightingale

Wyatt’s diary

Pussycats

Four last things

The family doctor

The Nose

The Summerhouse

The crocodile skin handbag

Across the road

The end of the affair

Shelyest

Initiation

What to do after the funeral

The gate of rain

Come in number 7

The figure in the tapestry

I long to talk with some old lover’s ghost

The curfew tolls

Why did you become a doctor?

Memoirs of an analyst

Letter to an elderly poet

Trouble at the nunnery

Petrol stations

Looking like that

Theatre of memory

Problems with theatre of memory

At Nam Yao

The wasp-orchid

Towards Laxmai

The flight from meaning

The second affair

Junk mail

Poultry

The Bathers

The butcher’s wink

The arctic fisherman’s outfit

Putting the phone down

But those unheard

In Bloomsbury Square

Our Neighbourhood

Real tennis

Empirical sonnets

The meaning is in the gaps

Enigma of arrival

Tired of waiting for the nightingale

Imaginary phone calls: Emily Bronte

Neuroanatomy

The missed appointment

Should Catullus be read by old people?

To Expand our Horizons

Wallace in undieland

Tosca under the duvet

Although we never

Eros and ASBO

Companion to Leopardi

War poet

The specimen

The tamer shores of love

A faulty connection

Snowboots

Shirley

Sea Wrack

Rumpelstiltskin Reflects

Mrs Ekstrom at the hotel of 10,000 chrysanthemums

Monday morning

It’s eight o’clock in the morning

In memory of Mr Pin

Getting over Glynis

The eye test

Will she come do you think?

Strange meeting

Fogarty’s handwriting

Building a herb garden: Fogie’s drift

Beneath enchanted trees

Cold calling

End of life plan (EOLP)

In point of fact

The Thomas Hardy book

My father at prayer

MAMA’S LAST JOURNEY: A DIARY FROM A CHINESE FUNERAL (2019)

NEW AND UNCOLLECTED POEMS

How the Seagull Learned to Cry

Take Us the Little Foxes

At Blagnini’s

The First Day of Spring Everyone Is Falling in Love

Greenfinch

Difficulties with Girls

Orla

On the Brenner Pass

Reply to Ovid

The Amadís de Gaula Syndrome

Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy

At Madame Zaza’s

Remonstrating with the Moon

The Problem with Maureen

Emily’s Afterthoughts

The Framing Effect

Evenlode House: Tango Lessons

Fieldwork

The Vanity Mirror

My Father’s Philosophy

Imitating Dad

The Piano

Strange Interview (Transcaucasian)

Not in Utter Nakedness

The Parade Ground

You Can Like Bach if you Try

That Fatal Interview

The Heidegger Period

How Doctors Think

Things to do in Lockdown

The Specialist

This Bed Thy Centre

I’Ll See Myself Out

Major Poet

Lockdown On Caringale Road

Jumping Ship

The Pedigree

The Frankincense Tree

The Journeys of Wyatt

If I could write like Tolstoy

A Sheltered Walk on Sheep’s Green in Lockdown

Nature Goes On

The Kitchen

Up Our Street

The Inspector Skeate Series

Also by Miles Burrows

Copyright

A VULTURE’S EGG

‘Women play an essential part in every man’s life,’ the deacon observed. ‘There’s no getting away from it.’

Anton Chekhov

ECONOMICS

Menelaos: Personally, I never cared for the girl.

She wasn’t really very much to look at

At close quarters. Many of us

Had seen better in Corinth, let alone Naucratis… What?

Naturally pride came into it: the family feud

Was taken seriously… but most of all

The Trojan corn monopoly, you understand…

The Bosporus blockade…

Our Black Sea trade

Was taken seriously, and a small country like Attica

With no internal resources at all

Depends to a very large extent

On imports coming via the Dardanelles.

It meant something in those days. As to Helen –

Well, she provided a convenient rallying cry.

(Our propagandists did extremely well

With their material.) But I must point out

The Trojan War was quite a serious business

MINIPOET

– slim, inexpensive, easy to discard

nippy rather than resonant, unpretentious.

we found them produced in increasing numbers

from oxford, home of pressed steel.

we remembered the days of the archpoet:

comfortable if rather lumbering,

extremely well upholstered.

still, the minipoet is basically safe.

not well equipped for (but who would think of)

leaving the highway, he is attuned

to the temporary surface, balanced,

reliable, yes, we have few regrets

for the archpoet, who either would not start

or starting stopped; was temperamental

wanted to show off, steamed up, was punctured:

we had to coax, persuade him he had wings

(we knew too well he hadn’t, but had to get

the ramshackle show on the road somehow).

my grandmother remembers teams of leopards

but most of us prefer the minipoet

for the sort of journeys we make nowadays.

CRITICISM

– Klondyke was of course writing very much within a tradition

Not only a vertical tradition

But a horizontal tradition.

He had his periphery.

He had his perigee.

He had his epicentricities.

A man of his time.

A man of his girth.

A man of New England stock.

O there was no nonsense about Klonberg.

You can be sure of that.

A man of integrity, yes

But above all a man surely of precision.

Of passion

Of precise passion, passionate precision.

An alloy of cultures.

And then you get very much I think a sense of vultures.

He is writing in a group.

He was pushing his own hoop.

He was writing for a set

Yes, and yet

Well of course Klonberg to me means somehow a person…

I mean take Quadragesimo.

Take it or leave it.

But it’s there.

Breathing.

FAMILY BUSINESS

In the Sorting Room old women picked bright oakum

While below them white flecks of garneted material

Floated and settled on men’s hair and on the rafters

Like warm volcanic snow, like ashes.

‘Why don’t you come to the Works more often?’

My father (who wanted to be a market gardener)

Would say, and I’d sit in the Office while he opened letters,

Traced the warehouse where they trod shoddy and mungo.

‘When are you coming to join your Dad then?’

They asked, and I would reply equivocally,

Desperately resolving to become a surgeon, a Trappist.

Looking at family photographs of Ephraim, the founder,

I could sympathise only with half-uncle Giles

(A bigamist who toured Iceland with a puppet theatre).

Now, having failed at both hosiery and puppets

I whisper to my son, standing on this Aegean headland,

‘Are you going to be a poet?’ But he smiles, amused

At the intensity of the tone, and cries to be put down.

DEATH OF A CLIMBER

The journalists supposed some question ‘torn

Out of his spirit by the formless snow

That brushed aside the implausible horoscope’

And swept it brusquely down the Matterhorn.

His family found it difficult to know

By reconstruction what happened on that slope.

His book survived his fall. They say it shows

Signs of anoxia, though it appears precise

Unphilosophic, deals with the shifting snows,

Confronts the tactical vagueness of the ice.

But he knew that there were no more hidden insights

To be gained at 14,000, and did not hope

To contemplate sublimity in heights:

The urgent issue was the choice of rope.

CONVERSATION IN AVALON

(Peire Vidal of Toulouse):

‘It was no woman we were after

Even though we were frequently associated with the name

Of someone else’s wife. That was the point, of course,

The inaccessibility. If the woman yielded

She could no longer be the object of unsatisfied desire,

Nor any longer command our subordination.

She proved to have been an unworthy subject of neoplatonic attention.

Or so it was at first. Later, things clarified.

We understood our Plotinus better

And that we were in love with images, figments

Built up of sensory fragments, but above all

Of the mind, mental. So that whatever the woman did

Could hardly affect the unchanging image

Which we, lovesick for absentees, had set our hearts on.

And if that brow, glass calm as an apocalyptic sea,

That mole, small as a pin dropped in a deep silence,

The erect carriage walking along avenues of topiary,

The long fingers, and in some cases even long toes,

The complexion, hyaline as alabaster,

The skin, sublucent with the pallor of the shadow

Of milk in a blue glass… if, in short, all this

Should prove unfaithful with us or anyone else,

The images remained, with the delicately turned phrases.

Whether this was all sophisticated casuistry

Designed to cover a wilful confusion of imagination with reality

I am uncertain. But I do not think so.

We knew what we were doing all right.

And above all we had the best of both worlds

Inside the cave and out. In such a case

It hardly mattered to us which world

Was assigned the greater degree of reality.

They say that the decline in troubadour morality

Occurred with this clarification of Plotinus.

But, as I say, this judgment does not seem to me to show

A very keen perception of what exactly was going on.

The decadence came surely very much later

With the perversion of courtesy into good manners.’

THE QUEST

Of 250,000 normal adult male poets

Comprising 200,000 ‘Apolline’ and 50,000 ‘White Goddess’,

100,000 of the ‘Apolline’ variety and 25,000 ‘White Goddess’

Were kept as control groups

The rest were injected with beryllium and washed in saline

And routinely leucotomised according to standard procedure.

After suffusion in derivatives of atropine and belladonna

It was found that

While 70,000 ‘Apolline’ showed a qualitative off-falling

Most of the White Goddess strain produced reactions to stimuli

Indistinguishable from former output.

Meanwhile and independently

Ferenczi and his co-workers in Brussels

Plotting on a logarithmic scale

Percentage of facial hairs erected

Against number of stanzas declaimed to random listeners

And multiplying abscissa by ordinate readings

Have claimed to establish an International Standard Housman Unit

Thereby showing some disrespect

To the poet’s own warning

‘But dead men’s lips are shaven clean

And never turn a hair.’

OXFORD POETRY

Three poets sat at the tea table in silence,

Each wanting to be the observer, not the observed

Each wanting to maintain an ironic silence,

Till one of them, who was bolder than the others,

Said, in a voice heavy with inverted commas:

‘I think you can carry dispassion too far, you know, Horstead.’

At which Horstead, with a gesture of valediction

Reminiscent of a palsied papal blessing,

Rose, and caught the 13 bus to Headington.

The two remained there like metallic birds,

Or that strange pre-Socratic who abandoned words.

SONG OF FATHER MALACOSTRAX

What if the second coming should stop coming?

The news would hardly make the centre page.

We hear the children in the graveyard humming

God is not dead but reaching middle age.

What if the characters just leave the stage,

The apocalyptic drums should leave off drumming?

What if Houdini should prefer the cage?

What if the second coming should stop coming?

Under the