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.

‘A remarkable achievement in a book that feels at once timely and deeply considered’ Irish Times

‘A book that speaks powerfully about what it is to be English and about the impact of coronavirus on our national psyche’ Observer

‘Will Burns is the new Defoe’ Adelle Stripe

Set in a shuttered pub – The Paper Lantern – in a village in the very middle of the country adjacent to the Prime Minister’s Chequers Estate, an unnamed narrator embarks on a series of walks in the Chiltern Hills. As he charts and interrogates the shifts in mood and understanding that have defined a transformative period in his own history and that of the surrounding area, he reveals a past scarred with trauma and a present lacking compass. Traversing local raves in secret valleys, to climate change and capitalism, The Paper Lantern creates a tangible, lived-in complicated rendering of a place, at the moment when the very sense of place itself is being questioned.

‘Hugely affecting and timely’ LUKE TURNER

‘A boldly struck chord, one that contains many of the dissonances, but also the harmonies, found in England today’ CHRIS POWER

In THE PAPER LANTERN, a single speaker charts and interrogates the shifts in mood and understanding that have defined a surreal, transformative period in both his own history and that of the surrounding area. Set in a shuttered pub – The Paper Lantern – in a village in the very middle of the country adjacent to the Chequers estate, the narrator embarks on a series of walks in the Chiltern Hills, which become the landscape for evocations of a past scarred with trauma and a present lacking compass. From local raves in secret valleys and the history of landmarks such as Halton House, to the fallout of the lockdown period, climate change and capitalism, THE PAPER LANTERN creates a tangible, lived-in, complicated rendering of a place.