Take us the Little Foxes

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 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 by John Carey. His work has been anthologised in British Poetry since 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. He lives in Cambridge.