Acquire Today Held Devised By Elizabeth Burns Issued As Pamphlet

collection, but not one to break any moulds, It was unfair on the poet that I was reading a biography of Edwin Morgan at the same time as reading this, and comparison between the two poets was maybe highlighted.
The vocabulary used in this collection is perhaps best characterised by what it excludes, There is very little nonstandard or 'new' English here, very little dialect, vernacular, slang, other languages, The use of proper names is tightly controlled a few places and people here and there certainly almost no trace of current affairs, brands, popular culture.
It goes without saying that no one talks like this no one could get far in everyday life with such a restricted stock of words but it is unusual to find even poetry like this today.


This is one reason why Burns' poems seem so fragile and precious, It seems almost unbelieveable that they can hold off the teeming heteroglossia that surrounds them, It is certainly noticeable when a slightly low word like 'shove' appears 'An eighteenthcentury experiment' or a slightly specialized one like 'felucca' 'A homecoming', while the rare specificity of 'Silloth', 'Carstairs', 'Cold War', and 'Nazis' draw you into geography and history.
And for me these moments give an extra pleasure, not least because they gently remind you that the collection's persistent themes bereavement, creativity always emerge from the evocation of a particular place and time even if the reader couldn't pin them them on a map or a calendar.


But the most characteristic feature of Held its signature, even is its astounding ability to span centuries and continents in a few lines, as the observation of something so humble as a stone coffin, an excavated trench , a river approaching the sea, gives way to a glimpse of its distant past or possible future.


In 'Transport', for example, an image of barges laden with gunpowder pulled by horses takes us back to the crofters gathering the kelp ash used in its production and forwards to the sea voyage and explosions on the other side of the ocean.
'History' combines in one view and a sublimely condensed apprehension of human and geological timescales the ruins of an abbey and a nuclear power station, 'whose indestructible / waste is in the seabed where layers of sediment / became the quarried sandstone, heaved over salt marsh to be turned into an abbey.
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The front cover of the book features a sitelinkwhite porcelain moon jar in the British Museum and the subject of one of the poems, but the material objects in these poems are not trapped in a display case they are invested with labour, love, power and suffering.
As the title suggests, it's what's inside them, the secret biographies they harbour, that counts,

Sometimes, it is true, the poems themselves seem a little too laboured and unconvincing, The metaphor of portrait and sitter in 'Diptych' feels overextended so that its point becomes unclear, The historical sweep of 'Holy Water' from mediaeval monks to nuclear subs packs in more descriptive and explanatory clauses than it needs, I think.
And the collection closes with 'This life' whose title I imagine unwittingly duplicates that of the cult TV series: it is the only time we find ourselves in an urban environment, and I wonder if it isn't just its protagonist a characteristic 'you' but the writer herself who feels uncomfortable there, as she slips into a series of glib, short, generalizing nouns before resting more surefootedly on the sensuous particular: '.
. . but this life with its city streets, its fizz and mix and mess, its rush of sweetpea scent, / the lightness of their petals, their brief and lovely bloom.
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This remarkable collection explores the complex ways in which people and things are held both metaphorically and physically in the world.
Through motifs of vessels and containers, Elizabeth Burns' exquisite and energetic poetry investigates the relationships between presence and absence, resilience and fragility.
As delicate as they are vivid, the poems in Held resonate with breathtaking emotional power, Previously published as a pamphlet, the central section of the collection, 'The Shortest Days', was winner of theMichael Marks Award for Poetry Pamphlets.
This is a deeply comforting collection which was really enriching to read, The images, the repetition of themes and ideas all comes together to make a highly memorable whole,

The central section "the shortest days" deservesif it was on its own, it was absolutely wonderful.
Librarian Note: There is than one author by this name in the Goodreads database, Having spent much of her life in Scotland, Elizabeth Burns moved to Lancaster where she taught creative writing, Her first full length collection, Ophelia and other poems, was published in, and was shortlisted for the Saltire Award for First Book of the Year.
Her second collection, The Gift of Light, was published in, followed by The Lantern Bearers in, Held, her fourth full length collection was published in, In addition to full length collections, Elizabeth produced a number of pamphlets including The Shortest Days, which won theMichael Marks Award.
The Alteration was shortlisted for the Callum Macdonald Poetry Pamphlet AwardHer w Librarian Note: There is than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
Having spent much of her life in Scotland, Elizabeth Burns moved to Lancaster where she taught creative writing, Her first full length collection, Ophelia and other poems, was published

in, and was shortlisted for the Saltire Award for First Book of the Year.
Her second collection, The Gift of Light, was published in, followed by The Lantern Bearers in, Held, her fourth full length collection was published in, In addition to full length collections, Elizabeth produced a number of pamphlets including The Shortest Days, which won theMichael Marks Award.
The Alteration was shortlisted for the Callum Macdonald Poetry Pamphlet AwardHer work has appeared in many anthologies of Scottish poetry, including Dreamstate: the new Scottish poets Polygon,, The Faber Book of Twentieth Century Scottish Poems Faber,, Modern Scottish Women Poets Canongate,, Scotlands: poet and nations Carcanet,, The Edinburgh Anthology of Twentieth century Scottish Poetry Edinburgh University Press,,Favourite Scottish Poems Luath,.
She was an early member of Pomegranate Women Writers in Edinburgh and continued to be closely involved in a writing group in Lancaster.
Her love of pottery and identification with the craft led her to a number of collaborations with ceramicists and other makers.
She also wrote about painters, including Gwen John, Winifred Nicholson, and Anne Redpath, From her first book, Ophelia and other Poems, Elizabeth was a poet whose work was suffused with the colour and scent of ordinary lives.
She was also a quietly fearless writer, never shying from the hurt done by one human to another, Her delicate and graceful poems have space in them for what has been lost or broken, for the flawed and crooked, as well as the sensuousness of the everyday, particularly in the lives of women which she celebrated in poem after poem.
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