The last collection of poetry and prose like this that he put out was, I believe, 1980's Notes From a Greasy Spoon, published by Cardiff University. It was a thick collection that I bought by mail as soon as it came out. The morning it arrived I wandered out to the café and read it cover to cover, wishing it was longer.

Here is the same wry and irreducible line in tale and verse. The same nub, understated. You can't deny it--he always has something to say.

The cover photo shows Jim outside the Village Voice bookshop (it's actually the one in Paris, full of Beatnik treasures).

In this collection the poems are even shorter than usual. The prose pieces include one about his army days called '1956', which I published as a Ragged Edge magsheet under the title 'Germany and All That Jazz'.

It's amazing how much talent, knowledge and true understanding the man possesses. He is well respected and bought and read by an audience that is, I assume, comparatively large in small press terms. But though he has done a huge amount of writing over the years and been published by some large and prestigious concerns such as the Guardian and Tribune (like George Orwell before him), he remains a rather obscure figure. A search on Google brings up a lot of references to Jim Burns the science fiction artist, but none, at least in the first half-dozen pages, to JB the poet and reviewer. This probably does not bother Jim, who is not interested in the Internet.

In fact, he has never seemed ambitious. His implication seems to be that he never expected to get anywhere, and after all, many of his idols--jazz blowers, working-class scribblers--carried on in the margins and reaped little if any reward of a pecuniary kind. Or is he just realistic, as well as avowedly socialistic? Many of us have our eye on the heights; Burns has kept his at about ground floor window level. With more backing and the right puffing he could have become a world renowned pundit, surely?