'Will Burns is a soulful English poet of the kind we don't make enough of' Max Porter

In his beautiful, evocative new collection, Natural Burial Ground, Will Burns explores his deep interest in place and the natural world to excavate the emotional impact of grief and loss. Natural Burial Ground 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.

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.

Time seeps into the soil of Natural Burial 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.

In poems alive with familiar wildlife and the communities they move among - seabirds on the wing, the fishermen's daily catch - Natural Burial Ground speaks to our connections to landscapes, to family, the impact of climate change, pop music, wildlife and history.

Praise for Will Burns


'Will Burns is a soulful English poet of the kind we don't make enough of. Fiercely intelligent, sensitive to the tiniest nuances of politics or history, attentive to the light and shade of human relationships, constantly addressing ideas of landscape and place with gentle, warm introspection. He is a poet of the unglamorous artificial English homelands, honest about class, memory, unease and experience in a way that few contemporary writers are. He doesn't try and sound clever in the line, he shows across his whole body of work that he is truly wise' Max Porter

'Only a poet as talented as Will Burns could guide us through the landscape of a transformed Britain and reveal with such vivid language its complexity, cruelty and beauty' Craig Taylor

'Will Burns is the new Defoe' Adelle Stripe

'Finally here is a writer who captures the psychology and topography of these weird market towns and villages where I grew up . . . In Will's writing I get a real sense of an emerging discussion about what it is to be English and a man in the 21st century' Luke Turner

'[Will Burns] offers a portrait of contemporary England and Englishness which manages to be critical and empathetic all at once' Will Ashon