Kindling
by Julie Burke
ISBN: 9781915434197
Format: Pamphlet, 44 pages,
Available (Published: September 2024)
£7.00
Book details
Kindling takes the embers of unreliable memory and sparks stories from them. Light-heartedly playing with images and form, many of these poems have a distinct scent of the sea about them while others burn with the fire of a life well-lived. Julie Burke has created a collection of poems that flicker with people and places, lives coming into being and lives lost, flights of fancy, and feet-firmly-on-the-ground reflections on the world that holds us all.
About the Author
Julie Burke worked as an au pair, toy maker, library assistant, biscuit inspector, sandwich vendor and balloon-shopkeeper before at last returning to her native Nottingham. Her poems have appeared in magazines including Brittle Star, South, The Cannon’s Mouth, Obsessed with Pipework, Dream Catcher, Dreich and ARTEMISpoetry, as well as in anthologies, exhibitions, websites, a podcast – even on a building. She is a member of Nottingham Poetry Society.
3 reviews for Kindling
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Five Leaves Publishing –
It’s always a treat to come across a new poet whose work flies off the page at you. Julie Burke’s Kindling is a delight from start to finish. The poems are clever and heart-felt and at times very funny, as they move at an engaging “…headlong, headstrong, head-down…” lick through childhood, on to the blushes and crushes of being a teenager, and then pick a careful path – in important boots – through adulthood. Any pamphlet of poetry that contains an exuberant paean to a Ford Zephyr has to be a must. These are poems that I know I’ll be re-reading and thinking about and recommending to friends.
Jenny Swann
Five Leaves Publishing –
D.A. Prince in ‘Orbis’
A happy coincidence: Julie Burke was the Featured Writer in ‘Orbis’ #211, with five poems varied in style. If you enjoyed her humour and playfulness with poetic form, you’ll find even more to like in this debut pamphlet. The narrative arc of her life holds the collection together, balancing personal loss and pain with the joys of family and friends, along with an eager curiosity about the quirky wider world. She begins with finding her own piano (‘Music therapy’):
in the second-hand shop
its smile found me from
across that boneyard
of birch, maple, hornbeam.
and ends, 35 poems later, with ‘Mum’s rules for a long and happy life’. It’s funny, recognisable, rhymes, and this16-liner deserves a place on the National Curriculum: ‘When in public / make no fuss. / Give your seat up / on the bus.’
Burke handles rhyme well, playing with it and keeping it fluid. She’s alert to how form can be an asset rather than a limitation. ‘Coast walk’, a series of snapshots of Devon seaside in April, is a sequence of haiku where the form (not obvious) keeps the subject closely in focus and immediately visible. She clearly enjoys playing with shape on the page: ‘Kite’ is a pattern-poem, a child’s kite plus tail flying in front of us, while ‘Displacement activities’ is a tall column of text built from the daily tasks which squeeze out the ‘…glorious / idea for a poem.’ ‘Thankful villages’ describes the feelings there when all the First World War soldiers returned (villages whose memorials have no dead) from the point of view of the boots they wore: ‘They marched away, fresh, / straight-laced and shiny black / with spit and polish’ before they return ‘battered and torn, soles worn’.
Burke’s publisher deserves recognition too. Five Leaves Publications (the publishing arm of the energetic independent bookshop in Nottingham) supports East Midlands poets with attentive editing and elegant design. Buy this: in a troubled world it will lift your spirits.
Five Leaves Publishing –
Pauline Kirk in ‘Dreamcatcher’ 51 (reviewed alongside Miniskirts in the Waste Land by Pralibha Castle)
Though different in style, mood and theme, these two poetry pamphlets show the importance of small independent presses in giving good but little-known poets a voice. Both collections ought to be more readily available. They show the diversity and quality of contemporary British poetry.
‘Kindling’ is perhaps the most accessible. It draws heavily on the poet’s memory and observation, often light-heartedly playing with images and form. I was captivated by the opening lines of the first poem, ‘Music therapy’:
When I first met my aunt’s piano
music found my fingers and emerged, stomping..
Burke’s poems often give us snapshots of people and scenes that have featured in her life. There is a strong sense of place, especially of the coast. Some of the poems are gently humorous, like ‘Soulmates’ and ‘New Learner’, or ‘Conchology’; others express deep emotion. ‘Buds’, for example, conveys the strength of a friendship that began in 1973 on the first day at a new school.
I love you – my spirit’s sister, my Best Bud.
I’ll never tell you that.
You’d just tell me to ‘shuddup’
and call me a prat…
Several of the poems deal with the loss of loved ones, portrayed through images and objects rather than by direct expressions of emotion.
‘Mysteries of the rosary’ is a moving portrayal of dementia:
Clobbered again by the things he’s forgotten,
not just the everyday
Where’s my stick?
Or What day is it? forgotten,
but solid gone forgotten.
The ending is deeply sad, yet hopeful. Though the loved one has forgotten how ‘to make/the sign of the cross,’ he still connects
in a tow rope through time,
all the way to the heaven
he still remembers.
Technically, ‘Kindling’ is quietly successful too. The form of each poem varies but fits the mood and tone. There are amusing concrete poems like ‘Kite’, ‘Finding Athena’, ‘The Dinner Party’ and ‘Displacement activities’. Sometimes the viewpoint is unusual, as in ‘Do urban gulls dream of the distant ocean?’ and ‘Workhorses’. It is the deeply personal poems that stay with me, however. ‘In between days’ captures the stage of grief between immediate loss and being able to think fondly of the lost one, while ‘Mum’s rules for a long and happy life’ captures a whole generation of women now gone.
[…]
I can recommend [both] collections. I wonder whether memory and close observation will provide as much material for future poets, now that we are looking down at screens, rather than around us?