James Roderick Burns presents us with a tasty, even if unconventional, three-course menu. First comes a mouth-watering celebration of the hot dog with its “warm and bready smile” which “cries out to be slathered in love’s sweet mustard”; for afters, we are offered a selection of amuse-bouches in the form of pithy haiku, tanka and sedoka (disarmingly labelled “a dog’s breakfast”). The substantial filling in this verbal sandwich is a blend of prose-poems and short fictions full of piquant, elusive and unexpected ingredients: reflections on unforeseen mortality, pre-verbal communication, the worldview of the capybara, infant physiology, and the regrettable disappearance of waffle-houses from the high street. There are also tasty chunks of film noir narrative, a surprise encounter with David Attenborough in a bat-cave and – especially relevant in the present context – a sympathetic exploration of the psyche of the blurb-writer.
Michael Bartholomew-Biggs, author of Poems in the Case
James Roderick Burns’ latest collection, Chopped Liver, certainly isn't ‘chopped liver’ in the sense of the well-known saying. On the contrary, it is a rich feast of offerings centred upon themes of food and disgruntlement, often intertwined. Using sedoka, prose poems, haiku and tanka, Burns shows himself as a masterful creator of little worlds, places often populated by the overindulgent, lonely, insignificant and underachieving – there’s a great deal of wit and humour, too, such as in two particularly memorable anthropomorphic prose poems that make one think of Lewis Carroll, ‘Trout Town, USA’, where “a whole trout community walking round on their tails” is imagined and ‘Slug’s Progress’, in which a slug takes a wife! Burns’ language throughout is poised and vivid, and he puts his fine eye for detail to excellent use in the exploration of such issues as American garishness and excess, British eccentricity (or is this more in the eye of beholders from other countries?) and, more generally, in his assured use of traditional Japanese short poetic forms.
Kevin Densley, author of Sacredly Profane |
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