My leavings are never quite in peace
Will Burns, Country Music
Offord Road, 76pp, £10.00, ISBN 9781916015913
reviewed by GE Stevens
Will Burns walks beside you through Country Music, his debut collection. He speaks quietly but with insistence and a language earthed firmly in the Anglo Saxon ‘Bucks country’ through which he roams. On the journey, Burns shares intimate stories of moments underlived, things left unfinished, unsaid. But his poems are not barbed responses to the past — though many, in considering choices made (and therefore those that weren’t) gesture to regret. Instead they carry with them an assimilated acceptance of the past, a kind of grown-up realism with more than a touch of melancholy hangover. This is why Burns is kind to his past; he doesn’t hold it hostage or interrogate it. He chats to it, laughs with it, enjoys naming its clutter of marijuana, Warren Zevon, the Belleville apartment where ‘Nothing in this place meant nothing.’
Occasionally Burns will pause, turn to look directly at you and deliver: ’you let yourself out in increments’ (A Chinese Restaurant Called Happiness) or ‘All winter I have pursued the flat voice / of my reading’ (The Word for Wood), but he will never linger there, on the line. Instead, he will resume his walking, because, above all, Burns is careful to never press too hard on meaning. And when he does venture towards a sharp point of concentrated feeling, he pulls back, mitigating it with vernacular, doubt or idiom. Take the poem, ‘Drive South Listening to Country Music’:
You can almost see Burns shrug as he writes ‘happy enough’. It’s a shrug we get to know well in Country Music; sometimes it’s a big-picture booze shrug: ‘I suppose you decided in the end / that it was just too far for you to come’. Other times it’s used to cement the truthfulness of a statement: ‘Honestly, / it’s a simple as that’ and frequently it’s a reminder that observation is not tantamount to criticism: ‘It’s a plain dinner we receive, but good all the same.’ A collection that shrugs is a collection that talks, animates itself on the page, that is open to saying ‘I don’t know’ and ‘I might never’. The upshot of this dance - where sentiment and drama are undercut by conversational realism and refused their habitual soap box - is that we trust the speaker. After all, it is an intimate, brave thing to doubt out loud. In ‘Cycnus in Soho’, Burns assembles the ‘memories in plaid’ of a long-ago infatuation with a man who ‘wore intellect as one-liners, elegantly, effortlessly.’ He snatches at moments shared, things felt but never said: ‘It took a Herculean will / to stop beating myself on your approval.’ In the end, he questions not just the detail of their relationship: ‘what was it in the end . . . lust?’ but whether it actually ever existed: ‘I sometimes wonder after all / If I didn’t make you up entirely.’ Like the songs that come in and out of this collection (and he himself is a musician), Burns knows that memories play out like old tunes, only half-rhyming with the moment once lived: ‘I notice a certain harmony / for the first time on an old song’ he writes in ‘Thirteen’, ‘something I must have been missing / for years — as if it had never been.’
For a collection pitched largely to the past, it is not surprising ghosts crop up. And Burns is very happy in the company of his ghosts; he addresses them as if in a pub, cajoling them to talk and affirm his memories. In ‘The World’s First Ghost’, dedicated to Jason Molina (1973 - 2013), he keeps the language loose and liquid: ‘We only had a handful of nights’ he begins, before describing their memories in vague collectives ‘some agitated phone calls’, ‘scotched plans’, ‘a gig or two, a couple of daytime beers’ or the news that Molina had moved home ‘whatever, wherever, the meant by then.’ Burns doesn’t want accuracy to sharpen the sentiment; he doesn’t want the poem to be just about those shared moments, but about the process of remembering, the lingering weight of memories, their maddening futility.
Despite many of the poems locating themselves abroad , there is a strong homing pull to Country Music. When Burns is away from ‘the vernacular of flint and brick’, his observations seem thinner skinned somehow, his language more jumpy. In ‘Brown Trout in Zion’, even ordering a beer opens them up to ridicule: ‘The cowboy hats shot us a look / when we ordered a Mexican beer’. Likewise, in ‘Hasher Country’, while listing to Merle Haggard on the radio, Burns follows the moment of connection all the way home: ‘it was as if the deep verdancy / of the trees either side of the road / reached all the way back to England.’ In ‘America Ground’, homesickness overpowers the present, cutting it dead. It begins with Burns looking for a strip bar to take a girl and her ‘second -rate male model friend’. Eventually they find one, and with the lines: ‘There had been drowned towns / back home, I told her, this summer’, Burns turns his lens back home, where, in micro, grotesque realism, he describes the devastation caused by the flooding:
There are many poems here that speak beautifully to this anxiety of displacement, but for me the quietest and most devastating line of them all is in the poem ‘Moth Book’. It begins ‘Echoes of myself as dust / in the places I have been / but am no longer.’ This is Burns at his most penetrating; the hopeful crescendo of ‘Something half-lit’ is answered with ‘ — dimness, gloom’ and this sense of frailty, hopelessness is carried over onto each line with delicate assurance. There is no swagger here, no pub, shrug or performance. This poem, I would argue, is the furthest Burns gets from home, which is perhaps why it contains within it these devastating three lines:
A quite different register emerges when Burns writes about the environment. There is anger and fear in these poems that reflect upon our senseless damage of the planet. Birds fall from original grace in Country Music; seabirds are born ‘oil-black’, hawks ‘feed / from landfills’, geese find themselves in some ‘shabby backwater’, whilst ’Hawks struggle on the wind’ that once carried them. Drought and flooding ensue; in ‘The Grey Headlands’, desiccation kills the grasses and, ‘Like the ground, the butterflies were dust.’ These poems, addressed to nature, about nature — land as warnings, parables even. In ‘Heavy Weather’, the final poem, the inevitability of flooding leaks inside, up the stairs, to a couple struggling with their own inevitable togetherness:
The more I read these poems, the more I feel that this collection is an exercise in remembering, in walking backwards into memory as ‘deep as I dare to go out’ (Greve de Lecq). Perhaps behind Burns’ delicately drawn observations of the past is his desire to make sense of them, or to live them twice. Or maybe, as the poem ‘Transmission’ suggests, it is to acknowledge the simplicity and sense of beginning:
Occasionally Burns will pause, turn to look directly at you and deliver: ’you let yourself out in increments’ (A Chinese Restaurant Called Happiness) or ‘All winter I have pursued the flat voice / of my reading’ (The Word for Wood), but he will never linger there, on the line. Instead, he will resume his walking, because, above all, Burns is careful to never press too hard on meaning. And when he does venture towards a sharp point of concentrated feeling, he pulls back, mitigating it with vernacular, doubt or idiom. Take the poem, ‘Drive South Listening to Country Music’:
I’m wishing it was a whole
continent we had to travel into,
with drives that last
whole days to get to the water,
and big game fish and names
like sockeye and wahoo to learn —
a land ready to receive us,
right to the edge of mesa.
But happy enough too
with our worn hills
You can almost see Burns shrug as he writes ‘happy enough’. It’s a shrug we get to know well in Country Music; sometimes it’s a big-picture booze shrug: ‘I suppose you decided in the end / that it was just too far for you to come’. Other times it’s used to cement the truthfulness of a statement: ‘Honestly, / it’s a simple as that’ and frequently it’s a reminder that observation is not tantamount to criticism: ‘It’s a plain dinner we receive, but good all the same.’ A collection that shrugs is a collection that talks, animates itself on the page, that is open to saying ‘I don’t know’ and ‘I might never’. The upshot of this dance - where sentiment and drama are undercut by conversational realism and refused their habitual soap box - is that we trust the speaker. After all, it is an intimate, brave thing to doubt out loud. In ‘Cycnus in Soho’, Burns assembles the ‘memories in plaid’ of a long-ago infatuation with a man who ‘wore intellect as one-liners, elegantly, effortlessly.’ He snatches at moments shared, things felt but never said: ‘It took a Herculean will / to stop beating myself on your approval.’ In the end, he questions not just the detail of their relationship: ‘what was it in the end . . . lust?’ but whether it actually ever existed: ‘I sometimes wonder after all / If I didn’t make you up entirely.’ Like the songs that come in and out of this collection (and he himself is a musician), Burns knows that memories play out like old tunes, only half-rhyming with the moment once lived: ‘I notice a certain harmony / for the first time on an old song’ he writes in ‘Thirteen’, ‘something I must have been missing / for years — as if it had never been.’
For a collection pitched largely to the past, it is not surprising ghosts crop up. And Burns is very happy in the company of his ghosts; he addresses them as if in a pub, cajoling them to talk and affirm his memories. In ‘The World’s First Ghost’, dedicated to Jason Molina (1973 - 2013), he keeps the language loose and liquid: ‘We only had a handful of nights’ he begins, before describing their memories in vague collectives ‘some agitated phone calls’, ‘scotched plans’, ‘a gig or two, a couple of daytime beers’ or the news that Molina had moved home ‘whatever, wherever, the meant by then.’ Burns doesn’t want accuracy to sharpen the sentiment; he doesn’t want the poem to be just about those shared moments, but about the process of remembering, the lingering weight of memories, their maddening futility.
Despite many of the poems locating themselves abroad , there is a strong homing pull to Country Music. When Burns is away from ‘the vernacular of flint and brick’, his observations seem thinner skinned somehow, his language more jumpy. In ‘Brown Trout in Zion’, even ordering a beer opens them up to ridicule: ‘The cowboy hats shot us a look / when we ordered a Mexican beer’. Likewise, in ‘Hasher Country’, while listing to Merle Haggard on the radio, Burns follows the moment of connection all the way home: ‘it was as if the deep verdancy / of the trees either side of the road / reached all the way back to England.’ In ‘America Ground’, homesickness overpowers the present, cutting it dead. It begins with Burns looking for a strip bar to take a girl and her ‘second -rate male model friend’. Eventually they find one, and with the lines: ‘There had been drowned towns / back home, I told her, this summer’, Burns turns his lens back home, where, in micro, grotesque realism, he describes the devastation caused by the flooding:
thick mid-section of skate,
un-winged by gulls and jackdaws
crop up on the suburban bank
of false, impermanent land.
There are many poems here that speak beautifully to this anxiety of displacement, but for me the quietest and most devastating line of them all is in the poem ‘Moth Book’. It begins ‘Echoes of myself as dust / in the places I have been / but am no longer.’ This is Burns at his most penetrating; the hopeful crescendo of ‘Something half-lit’ is answered with ‘ — dimness, gloom’ and this sense of frailty, hopelessness is carried over onto each line with delicate assurance. There is no swagger here, no pub, shrug or performance. This poem, I would argue, is the furthest Burns gets from home, which is perhaps why it contains within it these devastating three lines:
My leavings are never quite in peace —
and the thousands that they are,
vanished beyond naming, beyond knowing.
A quite different register emerges when Burns writes about the environment. There is anger and fear in these poems that reflect upon our senseless damage of the planet. Birds fall from original grace in Country Music; seabirds are born ‘oil-black’, hawks ‘feed / from landfills’, geese find themselves in some ‘shabby backwater’, whilst ’Hawks struggle on the wind’ that once carried them. Drought and flooding ensue; in ‘The Grey Headlands’, desiccation kills the grasses and, ‘Like the ground, the butterflies were dust.’ These poems, addressed to nature, about nature — land as warnings, parables even. In ‘Heavy Weather’, the final poem, the inevitability of flooding leaks inside, up the stairs, to a couple struggling with their own inevitable togetherness:
They said it would come, a rain like this.
we’re up late
with one of your coughing fits.
The more I read these poems, the more I feel that this collection is an exercise in remembering, in walking backwards into memory as ‘deep as I dare to go out’ (Greve de Lecq). Perhaps behind Burns’ delicately drawn observations of the past is his desire to make sense of them, or to live them twice. Or maybe, as the poem ‘Transmission’ suggests, it is to acknowledge the simplicity and sense of beginning:
Remembering there is
provenance to the curved
ditch that runs below the trees
at the foot of the hill.