Waiting for the Nightingale

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21st Century
A01=Miles Burrows
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Author_Miles Burrows
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British
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DCF
COP=United Kingdom
death
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eq_biography-true-stories
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eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
Far East
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Language_English
love
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Price_€10 to €20
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religion
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Product details

  • ISBN 9781784103408
  • Dimensions: 135 x 216mm
  • Publication Date: 27 Apr 2017
  • Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Paperback
  • Language: English
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Miles Burrows is a poet always in love, and confused – as lovers tend to be – by the inconstant nature of ‘the other’. In this, his second book of poems, published half a century after the first (A Vulture’s Egg, 1966), he is also aware, merrily for the most part, of mortality. Eros and Thanatos tap at his funny bone. Does God exist? he asks. Will the nightingale, the one right nightingale, sing?
The landscapes of these poems are drawn from the Far East, New Guinea and the Home Counties, where Burrows has served as a doctor, psychiatrist and a teacher. Thematically the poems build on Burrows’s eccentric childhood in a vanished but vividly reimagined, even re-invented England, rich in voices, disappointments and epiphanies and always maintaining a dialogue – now mischievous, now outrageous – with the present. The reader gratefully turns the pages, hoping the conversation will continue well beyond the back cover.
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.

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