Description
Nothing in the place meant nothing. The poems in Country Music are observant, curious, finding everywhere they look detail worthy of notice, determined in that ‘The falsehood is that there is little / left for us to know’. This same faith in the minutiae of the world acknowledges the cost of our decisions, however small – that ‘To feel the evening coming up / and to stream one way or another’ can be the difference between this life and that, ‘at once to feel / all these things change’. From the intimately personal – the choices that lead us towards, or away from, old friends, lovers, family members and their lost and vanishing stories, to the collective – humanity’s ‘bad choices piling up like debts’ – Burns is everywhere concerned with consequence and responsibility. ‘The bloody mess of individuals – / plastic stuff outside an abandoned tent’, tobacco packaging, dogshit, old newspapers, styrofoam, white goods, both blend into and
