Miles Burrows was born in Leicester in 1936 and educated at Wadham College Oxford, where he graduated in Classics, Philosophy and Medicine. He has practised as a doctor in the UK, New Guinea and in the Far East. He currently lives and works in Cambridge. His collection Waiting for the Nightingale was published by Carcanet in April 2017.
This week's blog is a poem written by Miles Burrows:
I'LL SEE MYSELF OUT
Some poets lift you up.
Others let you down.
Most leave you exactly where you were.
I’m reading the banker poets.
Many of the top poets were bankers.
(You don’t have to drown in a yacht.
You may think that’s a help but it’s not).
The banker poets write with prescience
And the self-knowledge and guilt of bankers.
And they are writing for other bankers.
I don’t mean the tailored girls always ready to help you with the computer
Beneath the replay of the giant football match, Everton vs Spurs
With the close up at ankle level,
I don’t mean the pretty Czech girls, or the wide eyed Irish colleens
Like hostesses in a plane which is not even wobbling
And keeps itself up on faith alone without us having to concentrate
I don’t mean the man who hurries out from offstage right
Like a ghost without looking right or left and puts his special card
Into a door in the wall as if escaping from the wrong cocktail party
Or the curtain has gone up on the wrong play.
But I mean the ones who are not here
The ones who are writing poems in the Mexican Gulf, for me.
My social life is in the bank,
In the queue that is space and time
I feel things are moving somewhere out of sight
And I have my place in the unhurried order of things
All I have to do is stand in the queue.
The girl at the desk says What is the date your father died?
And when I tell her she pauses and says Lovely.
And we are standing together seeing the lichen
On his grave in the Arran islands.
Looking straight ahead, our hands nearly touching. There’s a crying of seagulls.
In a minute she’s going to ask me the name of my first dog.
I hold it ready in my mind.
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If you would like to watch Miles read the poem 'Sea Wrack' from his collection, please click below:
Waiting for the Nightingale is available to buy here.
