Natural Burial Ground

<p><b>'Will Burns is a soulful English poet of the kind we don't make enough of' Max Porter</b><br><br>In his beautiful, evocative new collection, <i>Natural Burial Ground</i>, Will Burns explores his deep interest in place and the natural world to excavate the emotional impact of grief and loss. <i>Natural Burial Ground</i> is by turns melancholy and musical, haunting and deeply empathetic, a collection that wrestles with the scope and heft of elegy, while retaining the poet's world-weary humour and range of imagery.<br><br>There is throughout a sense of 'home' as unsettled, or unsettling - the landscapes of the Home Counties and of the Channel Islands - the very concept of islands themselves, becoming changed, haunted, in the wake of human experience.<br><br>Time seeps into the soil of <i>Natural Burial </i>Ground. Reckoning with profound grief, and a country rife with 'Restrictions, recriminations . . .' - the poet finds the past visible everywhere on these grounds, where places come loaded with meaning across time - the deep past of archaeology, the weight of the personal-present, the reticent, uncertain future.<br><br>In poems alive with familiar wildlife and the communities they move among - seabirds on the wing, the fishermen's daily catch - <i>Natural Burial Ground</i> speaks to our connections to landscapes, to family, the impact of climate change, pop music, wildlife and history.</p>