A Review of Undercover Work by Nick Burbridge (Olympia Publishers, 2025)
By Alan Morrison
Nick Burbridge is a Brighton-based ‘stalwart of the folk revival’, a veteran songwriter-lyricist for McDermott’s Two Hours and The Levellers, and parallel to his musical career, a widely published poet and writer, author of novels, plays (Cock Robin) and three previous poetry collections. Undercover Work is his fourth full collection and first in fourteen years following The Unicycle Set (Waterloo, 2011).
Burbridge’s poetry is consummate, always well-sculpted, figurative yet accessible, and it’s easy to see why many of the poems in Undercover Work have previously appeared in high profile journals such as Acumen, Agenda, Ambit, Envoi and Stand. But there is much more to Burbridge’s poetry, a straddling angst, an edgy darkness, that marks him out as something distinct against the poetry mainstream.
‘The Art of the Short Story’ is a critical take on the strained etiquette and affectedness of literary events:
Once she’s launched a new anthology
for aspirants, and its hardcover
drips with cracked champagne,
the editor – indelibly lined face,
strict fringe and smoke-filled voice –
takes a taxi with one young pretender
from a village on the south coast,
wearing his Lawrentian manner like a cloak…
In meeting rooms and backstreet bars
he will spend years denying his epiphany.
Mottled manuscripts in piles will testify
to verve and zeal…
Elsewhere, the continuing broken narrative of Burbridge’s alter ego ‘Dublin Flynn’ punctuates the collection, most colourfully in the picaresque ‘Molloy’s Wake’. In ‘Flynn and The Ranter’, the narrator remarks: ‘I should be squatting in some long-lost forest/ plotting mayhem among Diggers, Levellers/ and Anarchists. Call me closet revolutionary,/ my path unfolds in my imagination’.
Burbridge, of Irish roots himself, passes poetic comment on the strictures of Catholicism. He writes descriptively of his background:
Burdened by dark challenge and defeat
I summon doughty forebears, an unlikely union
that flourished in a cottage and a market garden
growing courgettes, cauliflowers, and strawberries
under cloches, in the hills near Bandon,
not so far from Béal naBláth
where rivalries once took a heavy turn.
(‘Veterans’)
Poems on Burbridge’s dysfunctional upbringing throw up some wonderful aphorisms: ‘simper through her homily chock-full of cliché’ (‘Matriarch’). ‘Patriarch’, a portrait of the poet’s emotionally remote father, begins at the ending: ‘When she parcelled you to your deathbed,/ a botched pack of blocked catheter and weeping sore’. There are touching moments, albeit without touch, only the touching of objects:
(once as keen to fashion ornate models
and scratch oblique marks
on my scrawled sheets, as you were loath
to deal with grip, seam, hurl and pitch,
so each of us recoiled at the other’s touch)
Fitting that this verse is in ellipses. There is a particularly effective alliterative passage:
When I came back at last, you thrust me
through the hotel lobby, palm against my spine,
past the aspidistra and bar billiard table
where I’d beaten you the night before
The alliterative patter of that third line works brilliantly in communicating the sense of flusteredness, almost like rapid fire. A passage on a photograph of the father in his younger foreign service days during World War 2 brought to mind Welsh poet Alun Lewis (1915-44) on his doomed Burma campaign, and in many ways Burbridge shares similarities with the clipped lyricism of the author of the stunning Raiders’ Dawn (1942) and Ha! Ha! Among the Trumpets (1946):
As your palms and fingers burn, while others stifle sobs
on leaning shoulders I stare alone at a quick image
stolen long ago, where that forgotten man,
in light fatigues, marching by an Indian lagoon,
years before this stumbling pacifist was born,
glances at me, like a perfect stranger.
‘Profiles’ is rich in alliterative tropes: ‘Barstool, broadsheet, and gin-shot,/ rolling shag smuggled in from France’; ‘When ghosts return, you still roll in the gutter/ and whoever lifts you hears your bitter tale:/ Belfast battlegrounds that claimed your brothers’. ‘Dirty Peace’ (dated 2014) is set during The Troubles:
My mental hostelry is so bombed out
I turn instinctively to Pat McGhee
in the bathroom of Room 625.
Behind the panel, my device ticks mutely,
planted like a pack of smuggled cigarettes,
a surgeon’s swab left lying in the gut.
As ageing sprite, forsaking ballot box
and Armalite shakes hands
with ermine figurehead, the undercover man
stands looking back through forty years of rain
round Portadown at the old Chalet Bar,
one autumn night rising from the ashes,
a dark shell shut in by corrugated iron
smelling of slurry and stacked wood.
This piling of physical image is typical of Burbridge’s more viscerally charged poems:
It’s too much for the acne-ridden squaddie
from Carshalton; his cocked finger bends,
his shoulder jerks at the kick of the butt;
a salvo pocks the plaster opposite.
The pack think they’re engaged and let loose
a ricocheting hail of steel,
round on round, until their load is shot.
To his dying day the old man will maintain
his volley of hurled prayers to every saint in heaven
and the Holy Mother left him untouched –
squatting by his pile with the burnt-out match
as torch beams focused on his trembling hulk.
Always writing from an outsider perspective, Burbridge depicts those on society’s margins, addicts, the homeless, and the mentally afflicted, as with the woman who is taken to the local psychiatric hospital:
More stale belch than prophecy.
Too many deaths in the family,
shots of Southern Comfort,
dark chemicals at work.
Against the undertow of solitude
she tried an angry march.
Here Burbridge’s succinct, clipped phrasing works extremely effectively, whilst alliteration and assonance impact the sounds. This poem is titled ‘Too Far Out’, presumably an allusion to Stevie Smith’s iconic poem ‘Not Waving but Drowning’ (‘I was much too far out all my life/ And not waving but drowning’)—fitting for a depiction of coastal psychosis.
The striking ‘From Sham to Rock’ is an intimate and unvarnished poem-portrait of Irish-Brightonian writer Gabriel Duffy (1942–2008), onetime protégé of Colin Wilson, in his obscure Brighton twilight. The title is taken from Duffy’s praised 2003 memoir of formation, his only published book, and in that, a testament to an author’s un-prolific output not dissimilarly to Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise (1938):
…you, in your trenchcoat and wool hat
bustling like a badger in a bolthole:
three dim rooms that brook no family
but house a cabin bed, a thousand books,
desk and screen, where you wrestle
with impenetrable projects so long shelved…
…licking your fingers as you fiddle with your fringe,
lost in a blistering torrent on whatever next,
while those unyielding works became dead weights
on your desk, a place of failure, a table
laid with plates for an uneaten dinner…
The ‘uneaten dinner’ serves as a profound metaphor for the Dublin-raised writer’s unfulfilled promise. Burbridge continues: ‘when… I’m washed up on the black strand/ where all drifters end, let me find you,/ battling your tar-baby with stuck hands,/ as mine, inevitably, waits for me’. And this underbelly of on-the-cusp-of-recognition Brighton bohemianism encompasses the self-perceptions of Burbridge and what he terms in the opening poem his ‘obscure celebrity’. But this vibrant volume generates its own limelight on a promise fulfilled.
An edited version of this review was published in the Morning Star 15 July 2025
