Arts Section, 9th August 2012

So what are the dreams of a man who has already enjoyed money, and power, and a successful career as an international businessman, and a certain degree of fame? For Dan Burt, it all comes down to being taken seriously as a writer. Mr. Burt, who lives most of the year in London, but who also spends time at his home on Schooner Head in Bar Harbor, will be reading from his latest book "We Look Like This," at the Jesup Memorial Library in Bar Harbor on the evening of Friday, Aug. 10, at 7 p.m.

In a recent conversation, Mr. Burt talked about his new work which features poems and prose in a style that some critics have described as "muscular," yet which betrays an unexpected sensitivity and gift of perception hidden behind an often dismissive and hard-bitten exterior. "The poet arises and the metaphor grows out of what you see and come to understand," he said of the process he uses to write. "You look for enduring elements under the structures, or in the character of a person," he continued. "From the entrails of reality you find understanding of the fundamental world around you."

30 July 2012

What is most surprising about Dan Burt’s poetry and prose collection We Look Like This is how familiar it feels. This is surprising not because somebody of 70 years of age with a distinguished legal – rather than literary – career behind him should have published such an assured first full-length collection in later life because, given how much of the volume deals with Burt’s American-Jewish upbringing, his work reads much like that of his European contemporaries: Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon and Thomas Kinsella all come to mind. Like these great poets, Burt’s work finds its voice through allusions to classical mythology, to poetic forebears such as Yeats and Tennyson, or to European art. And just as two of that Irish trinity have utilised their extensive time spent in America as a way of writing about time spent back home, Burt’s work makes that transatlantic journey in reverse.

Its familiarity, however, can also belie the subtlety of Burt’s writing. There are several poems in this volume that could undoubtedly hold their own next to works by Longley, Muldoon or Kinsella. ‘Winter Mornings,’ for example, takes the form of a bitter-sweet tromp l’oeil in which mirage morphs into memory; the momentary mis-sighting of a figure in Hyde Park leaves the poet ‘Like a drawn watch too long at sea’ to recall the pain of a distant love.

26th May 2012

Review of We Look Like This - Carcanet Press

South Philadelphia gave Dan Burt a brutal childhood: as a five-year-old his father punched him in the face; as a teenager he had to work in the family butcher's shop; his mother came from a family of gangsters. The trajectory of his escape from this background, through the University of Cambridge and Yale Law School is unusual enough; the poetry he is writing now is remarkable.

This is a major debut. Burt's tough, terse language explores the human truth reached when all protective skin is stripped away:

We look like this after things fall apart...
The painting is the autopsy report.

25 August 2011

The centrepiece of Dan Burt’s second Lintott chapbook collection is a tense, often brilliant prose-memoir of his formative years in the post-war, working-class, Jewish district of South Philadelphia. In particular, it is a portrait of his parents, Joe Burt, the youngest son of a carpenter from the Pale, and Louise Kevitch, the daughter of “tough Jews” who ran the Tenderloin’s numbers racket and its associated prostitution, gambling and protection operations for half a century until the action moved to Atlantic City.

Our sympathies are subtly but firmly directed towards Joe, a brawler and semi-pro boxer whose fights seem emblematic of a wider social and ethnic struggle for survival. “Lust and rage beset his every age”, the author writes, with a feeling mixture of revulsion and pride, before reassuring us that “bullies and every form of authority were [his father’s] targets”. At the age of ten, he fells a lout with a lead pipe. Scarred by the Depression, Joe drops out of school (his brother stays on), becomes a butcher, struggles to keep the family business afloat, but is saved by war-time trade and the deals he cuts with black-market slaughterhouses. Justice is rough. When an anti-profiteering inspector asks to see the coupons for the meat being sold, Joe pitches him through a plate-glass window. When Louise stalls the car in front of a tram and the tram driver insults her “sex, intelligence and parents”, Joe runs to the tram, hauls out the driver and beats him unconscious. A lot of this instinctive, retributive violence is complicated, and in part explained, by its proximity to the Kevitches, a clan of Jacobean monstrosities – and murderers – from whom Joe does his best to shield Dan, but on whom, of course, the family also relies to get Joe off the hook after the defenestration; to pay off the IRS, to “protect” its own faltering respectability. They are a frankly terrifying crowd, shooting state legislators, gunning down delinquents, denying everything, and their mad annexation of mob loyalty to aspirationalism is contagious, so that when Joe finally wins $250 in a crap game and blows it all on a model-train set for his two boys, Dan and Rick, we sense the gesture’s doubleness, the guilt behind the sudden, jarring generosity.

4th August 2011

BAR HARBOR — A man whose journey through life has taken him from the high-stakes worlds of the courtroom and corporate boardrooms to searching for meaning by dissecting the depths of the human soul in a quiet room by the sea is slated to do a reading and to sign copies of his chapbooks at the Jesup Memorial Library here on Wednesday, Aug. 10 beginning at 7 p.m.

Dan Burt recently published his second chapbook, “Certain windows.” It includes poems, sequences and the title prose, a vivid memoir evoking a harsh formative world. Among other characters, the poet’s father comes alive in the poems as a powerful, hard and sympathetic figure with the wisdom of the man of action. In “Certain Windows” the dominant notes are elegiac and philosophical and Mr. Burt is rigorously unsentimental in his retrospection and unillusioned in his sense of the natural and social worlds.