Book Review

Books written, conceived or set in Wendover and the surrounding area...

'Country Music', by Will Burns. Reviewed by Rory Lavery, volunteer writer/sub-editor, Wendover News.

Will Burns is a local poet – and he deserves the title – whose first collection, Country Music, is a delightful debut, and this month’s Wendover News recommendation.

Not only will these poems awaken a nourishing love for carefully woven language, they direct our eyes to details we’d ordinarily miss in our day-to-day lives - restoring our love of the world from which the poems themselves spring.

In ‘Drive South Listening to Country Music’, the shared silence of a car journey between brothers, is lovingly remembered through the ordinarily dull detail of an accelerator: ‘pedal steel flowing / into your silence like all your best fish’ is a delightful image of the deep current that charges the silence of our most intimate relationships.

This poem is lodged firmly and lovingly in the local, but yearns for a larger, more beautiful and encompassing horizon towards which love and poetry point: ‘I’m wishing it was a whole / continent we had to travel into [...] a land ready to receive us / right to the edge of the mesa’. Mesa, I learned, refers to the high rocky tablelands and plateaus in the arid areas of the United States.

The poems contained in the book are cause for nourishment indeed, and, as all good poetry does, it’s left my vision of the world shaken up and sharpened, refreshed and restored. If you like the flavour presented in this column, you can find a copy of the full collection via the author’s website, or our local bookstore.

You can also find an extended version of this book review on the Wendover News website at www.wendovernews.co.uk

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