29th March 2013

The superb American poet Dan Burt's We Look Like This deals ironically with common notions of Jewish appearance; an irony reinforced by Frank Auerbach's heavily impastoed portrait, Head of Gerda Boeh, on its cover.

And indeed, several of the poems here have explicitly Jewish themes, Circumcision, for example, and Inquisition, together with a 36-page autobiographical prose piece, Certain Windows.

The book comes with a CD for those people too busy to experience poetry on the page.

Here, to whet the appetite, is the bleak but beautiful concluding stanza of Burt's Compounds:

Tunis rises where Rome sowed
Al Aqsa rests on Temple bones
At Passchendaele the cattle low
In Nagasaki gardens grow:
Ash blackens, rain clears the skies
Pain ends when the creature dies.