Germ Songs

Germ Songs is a collaborative work by illustrator Jess White and poet Will Burns. These poems and drawings take their shape from the land, utilising both artists’ interest in the natural world and the questions that close observation ask of us as human beings living through the landscape and flora that surround us. They also raise questions about access to these spaces, about property, ownership, boundaries, and how these ideas have played out through history. These themes echo ideas that have resonated with both White and Burns in the work of William Morris—the nature of beauty, hard-won love, the importance of the natural world, and the influence of a northern European literary tradition, but asking what all this might mean today.