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.

Mr. Burt, an avid sailor who owns a summer home on Schooner Head in Bar Harbor, was born in South Philadelphia in 1942. He attended state schools and a local Catholic college before reading English at Cambridge. He graduated from Yale Law School and practiced law in the United States, United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia before moving to London in 1994 and becoming a British citizen.

One of his most high profile cases involved suing CBS News for libel on behalf of Gen. William Westmoreland in 1985.

BBC Radio 4 recently interviewed Mr. Burt about “Little Black Dress,” a poem from his first chapbook, “Searched for Text.”

A review of “Certain Windows,” recently appeared on the website of The Poetry Book Society, the organization T.S. Eliot founded to promote the reading and sale of poetry. Reviewer George Szirtes, a well known and respected British poet and literary figure and president of the PBS, and who won Britain’s most prestigious poetry prize a few years ago, praised Mr. Burt’s writing.

“…the verse flexes muscle after muscle. Burt is excellent on place and occasion,” Mr. Szirtes wrote. “The tetrametric lines bulge with energy,” he continued. “There is energy too in the way the image of Burt's father is recalled in ‘Who He Was’ … It is masculine writing celebrating a masculine sense of temper and purpose. The writing isn’t always as muscle bound as this: it can hover and dance. It has genuine grace.”

Mr. Burt is an honorary fellow of St. John’s College Cambridge and lives and writes in London. His poetry publications include the Lintott pamphlet “Searched for Text” and “Cold Eye,” a poetry and image collaboration with the artist Paul Hodgson from 2010.

The event is in conjunction with Sherman’s book store.

EARL BRECHLIN
Mount Desert Islander