Take us the Little Foxes: Collected Poems
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.
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Take us the Little Foxes: Collected Poems
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.
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Take us the Little Foxes: Collected Poems

Take us the Little Foxes: Collected Poems

by Miles Burrows
Take us the Little Foxes: Collected Poems

Take us the Little Foxes: Collected Poems

by Miles Burrows

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$23.99 
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Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781800171398
Publisher: Carcanet Press, Limited
Publication date: 10/28/2021
Pages: 208
Product dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

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 work has been anthologised in British Poetrysince 1945 (Penguin: ed. Lucie-Smith) and in Best Poems of the Year 2012 (Forward). He is a regular contributor to TLS, Poetry Review, and PN Review. He has worked as a doctor in New Guinea, Thailand, and Haverhill. His first Carcanet collection, Waiting for the Nightingale, was published in 2017.

Table of Contents

A Vulture's Egg (1966)

Economics 17

Minipoet 17

Criticism 18

Family Business 19

Death of a Climber 20

Conversation in Avalon 20

The Quest 21

Oxford Poetry 22

Song of Father Malacostrax 23

Small Part 23

Living on the Tottenham Court Road 24

The Visit 25

The Profession 25

Kropotkin 26

Exchange Therapy 26

Skyros 1 27

Skyros 2 (tired of looking for Rupert Brooke's grave) 28

Menelaos at Aulis 28

Odysseus 29

Tantum Religio 30

Two Poplars at Binsey 31

Cathedral by Gaudi 32

The Non-Awarding of the Newdigate Prize 33

Mask from Nicobar 33

Troy 34

Trotmer and Whitethorn 36

Fragment of a letter from Helen to Teiresias 37

Chanson Domestique 39

Detective Story 40

Postcard from Greece 41

Lunch with the Registrar 42

Terminal Ward 43

Pannychion 44

The IMZA Urn 45

Mergrove Street 45

Miss Apsley 46

Tomi Revisited (from the Russian original by Leonid Martinov) 47

Last of the arrogant Latinists 48

Apprentice in the Garden of Contingency 49

Lines for the grave of a linguistic philosopher 50

Icelandic Journal

Icelandic Journal 53

At Sea 57

First Watch 59

Two a.m. 60

Hauling in 60

Hauling in (2) 61

Appendix: Fragments 64

Waiting for the Nightingale (2017)

English provincial poetry 71

Out of Dewar 72

Waiting for the nightingale 73

Wyatt's diary 74

Pussycats 74

Four last things 75

The family doctor 76

The Nose 77

The summerhouse 78

The crocodile skin handbag 79

Across the road 79

The end of the affair 80

Shelyest 82

Initiation 83

What to do after the funeral 84

The gate of rain 85

Come in number 7 86

The figure in the tapestry 86

I long to talk with some old lover's ghost 88

The curfew tolls 88

Why did you become a doctor? 89

Memoirs of an analyst 91

Letter to an elderly poet 92

Trouble at the nunnery 92

Petrol stations 93

Looking like that 94

Theatre of memory 94

Problems with theatre of memory 96

At Nam Yao 96

The wasp-orchid 97

Towards Laxmai 98

The flight from meaning 99

The second affair 99

Junk mail 100

Poultry 101

The bathers 101

The butcher's wink 103

The arctic fisherman's outfit 104

Putting the phone down 105

But those unheard 106

In Bloomsbury Square 107

Our Neighbourhood 108

Real tennis 109

Empirical sonnets 109

The meaning is in the gaps 110

Enigma of arrival 112

Tired of waiting for the nightingale 113

Imaginary phone calls: Emily Bronte 113

Neuroanatomy 114

The missed appointment 115

Should Catullus be read by old people? 116

To Expand our Horizons 117

Wallace in undieland 118

Tosca under the duvet 123

Although we never 124

Eros and ASBO 125

Companion to Leopardi 125

War poet 126

The specimen 127

The tamer shores of love 128

A faulty connection 129

Snowboots 130

Shirley 131

Sea Wrack 131

Rumpelstiltskin reflects 132

Mrs Ekstrom at the hotel of 10,000 chrysanthemums 133

Monday morning 134

It's eight o'clock in the morning 135

In memory of Mr Pin 137

Getting over Glynis 137

The eye test 137

Will she come do you think? 138

Strange meeting 139

Fogarty's handwriting 139

Building a herb garden: Fogie's drift 140

Beneath enchanted trees 140

Cold calling 142

End of life plan (EOLP) 143

In point of fact 145

The Thomas Hardy book 146

My father at prayer 147

Mama's Last Journey: A Diary from a Chinese Funeral (2019) 149

New and Uncollected Poems

How the Seagull Learned to Cry 167

Take Us the Little Foxes 169

At Blagnini's 172

The First Day of Spring Everyone Is Falling in Love 176

Greenfinch 176

Difficulties with Girls 177

Orla 177

On the Brenner Pass 178

Reply to Ovid 180

The Amadís de Gaula Syndrome 181

Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy 181

At Madame Zaza's 182

Remonstrating with the Moon 183

The Problem with Maureen 183

Emily's Afterthoughts 184

The Framing Effect 184

Evenlode House: Tango Lessons 185

Fieldwork 186

The Vanity Mirror 187

My Father's Philosophy 187

Imitating Dad 188

The Piano 188

Strange Interview (Transcaucasian) 189

Not in Utter Nakedness 190

The Parade Ground 191

You Can Like Bach if you Try 192

That Fatal Interview 193

The Heidegger Period 194

How Doctors Think 196

Things to do in Lockdown 196

The Specialist 197

This Bed Thy Centre 197

I'll See Myself Out 198

Major Poet 199

Lockdown on Caringale Road 200

Jumping Ship 201

The Pedigree 202

The Frankincense Tree 202

The Journeys of Wyatt 203

If I could write like Tolstoy 204

A Sheltered Walk on Sheep's Green in Lockdown 205

Nature Goes On 206

The Kitchen 206

Up Our Street 207

The Inspector Skeate Series 208

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