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.

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.