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’.

An American, and in any case too young to have felt the menace of the Holocaust directly, he is obsessed by the evidence it offers of human callousness; rather as in the paintings of R.B. Kitaj, that knowledge underpins his poetry. And the sufferingof his fellow Jews spans generations. In 'Circumcision' a forebear leans over at the moment of the ritual snip to say: 'For him our suffering began today'.

He writes well of old Turkish Baths, where towelled Jews lie in rows after bathing; to the eye of his imagination they resemble corpses after a Cossack raid. He wonders if the sight would have been the same in Odessa before the Second World War, or in Toledo before the Inquisition. As the present-day bathers lie comfortably, they ponder Arendt's question: Why didn't the Jews fight? Burt is a harsh witness, but not only of others. 'Slowly Sounds The Bell' speaks frankly of the death of a brother, and confesses his indifference on hearing of it; and perhaps worsethan indifference, as he suggests in the last couplet:

Adam's curse is not to scrabble for bread
But toiling to love others not wish them dead.

There is an awkwardness in that couplet which matches his admission. Indeed, he is more concerned to have a strong rhyme than to listen to the jostling of syllables in the last line.

Burt's anger sustains him even more as he writes of welcoming old age as a 'blessed thief'':

Who will steal me to he dark beyond the need
Of light to read and this damned rage to speak?

He believes that he will not find the answer to his questions in any text he searches, only in the lines he writes himself. Hence the title of this collection, and the seriousness of these poems.

ELAINE FEINSTEIN