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..."

The central prose section, "Certain windows", is a superb memoir of the poet's challenging early life in a poor Jewish neighbourhood of Philadelphia. It has already been pointed out that the book's structure – poems, prose, poems – mirrors that of Robert Lowell's famous Life Studies, but Burt's hard-knock upbringing is the other side of the tracks from Lowell's sublime Boston Brahminity. The poet finds solace in fishing and sailing, a trait caught from his father: as the boatmen "pause – to watch sedge sway on flats/ Geese rise honking from wetland choirs", we savour the Keatsian echoes. Full of hard-won wisdom and beautiful lines, it's testament to the transforming power of poetry.

SUZI FEAY THE INDEPENDENT