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.