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Take us the Little Foxes

Collected Poems

Miles Burrows

Cover of Take us the Little Foxes by Miles Burrows
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Categories: 21st Century, British, Humour
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (208 pages)
(Pub. Aug 2021)
9781800171398
£14.99 £13.49
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(Pub. Aug 2021)
9781800171404
£11.99 £10.79
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  • Description
  • Author
  • Reviews
  • An Irish Times Best Poetry Books of 2021

    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 was 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.
    Miles Burrows studied at Charterhouse and Wadham College Oxford. He read Russian in National Service, then Classics and Medicine. He worked as travel and fiction reviewer at the New Statesman and his poems appeared on radio and television. His first collection, A Vulture’s Egg, was published by Cape and reviewed ... read more
    'Precisely timed narratives, the warmest entertaining poems opening sudden trapdoors to Chekhovian shocks of horror.'

    Martina Evans, Irish Times Best Books of the Year 2021

    Praise for Miles Burrows 'A much travelled poet-doctor, he brings finesse, imagination and a fierce sense of humour to his work, synchronising the arts of comedy, storytelling and verse-making to remind us that there's a craft fundamental to all three - the craft of timing.'
    Carol Rumens in The Poetry Review

     'This is a lovely, dancing, waywardly humorous collection, easily the funniest book of poems about the raging nonsense of love that I have read in living memory'
    Michael Glover, The Tablet

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