17th July 2011

In Certain Windows (Lintott Press, £9.95), the US-born poet Dan Burt tames painful memories into disciplined, memorable lines. "My heels rucked the kitchen rug as she dragged/ Me out at five to fight a bully," he writes of his mother, and now, "if lover lift a hand to caress my cheek/ I flinch." The family business was his blacking factory: "I was sent to the cold with men," he observes in "Ishmael". "Swaddled in white coat, chin to uppers/ I trained from twelve to butcher meat." The formal patterns of rhyme and metre are handled with equally sharp skill: "No angels graced that wilderness/ No wells, no Hagar, no augur..."

June 2011

Dan Burt's book, Certain Windows, offers a mirror to Robert Lowell's 1959 book, Life Studies, in that it is directly set in the world of the poet's childhood and is written in muscular verse (often but not always rhymed, moving on light feet around the hard core of pentameter) with a long central section in prose. Burt's prose piece, ‘Certain Windows' parallels Lowell's '91, Revere Street'. The very form of the book - poems, prose, poems - invites comparison.

Burt comes from quite a different background from Lowell. Lowell's Boston ancestors could be traced back to the Mayflower and include politicians, poets, theologians: people generally referred to as Brahmins. Like Lowell's family the Burts, who were not yet Burts but Russian Jews, arrived by boat, but much later, in 1915 or 1916, grandfather Zaida escaping pogroms and conscription into the Russian army. Those members of the family who remained behind were killed. Ancestry is important. Burt's central section begins with a nod to both Wordsworth and Lowell, declaring: ‘We trail no clouds of glory when we come'. The first numbered section within the prose is quite knowingly titled: Ancestral Houses.

7th April 2011

Poetry, in essence, is about the search for truth. And for poet Dan Burt, who made his mark in life, and his considerable fortune, as a high-powered attorney and successful international businessman, writing is a way to reconnect to the fundemental truths he discovered as a young man - touch-stones that so often in his life become hopelessly buried under the sediments of expediency, self deception and compromise.

It is a process of stripping away those layers, to reveal the original strata below, that drives Mr. Burt - regardless of how potentially shocking or upsetting the thoughts revealed by the naked bedrock of his soul may be.

20th August 2009

Soulfulness is not the first term people associate with attorneys. So how does one go from being a nationally prominent attorney to becoming an up-and-coming, internationally known poet?

It helps, naturally, if you have a modest nest egg and drop out of the limelight for a while; but as most people would undoubtedly acknowledge, the basic skill sets for those professions reside at opposite ends of the intellectual spectrum. One requires strict conformity to society’s written rules, interpreted through careful, dispassionate, logic.

EMERGING TALENTS

July/August 2009

Dan Burt’s Searched for Text is a short book, little more than a pamphlet with a spine, but the poems are strikingly ambitious. His language is terse to the point of brutality; the verbs ferocious, often monosyllabic; his core conviction, formed by the history of twentieth century and a lifetime in a non-literary world, is of ‘the curtain falling on Enlightenment’.