September, 2020

Dan Burt is a poet from a corporate corner of the real world: Salvage at Twilight is his second full-length collection after a career in law and business. Like its predecessor, We Look Like This (2012), it is a compendium of prose memoir and short poems, the latter taking up two thirds of its length, and mostly consisting of life studies: it is clear Burt wishes to emulate Robert Lowell, albeit as very much his own man, though the influence is sometimes insufficiently digested, and the poems are occasionally too quick to get things over and done with. Still, they are admirably gutsy and hearty, do not fight shy of bluntness, and often work amicably against loose but traceable formal constraints: in one, he murmurs “Traitor, as I stand, / cancelled blue passport in hand, / a grey haired alien on foreign land”, and contemplates “Yankee Doodle verities, / poured into us as kids, / corroded loyalty to hostility”. That’s probably enough to ensure he gets the glove treatment at customs next time he flies stateside (Burt has for many years made his home in the UK). Another finds him in the library at Princeton, desperate to “muffle that devil at my ear / until it’s almost impossible to hear / You’re a wannabe from a trading floor”. In another, “Surgeons probed the ruin / that six weeks ago was a woman”. 

Comparable unsubtlety crashes down everywhere: in an ekphrasis on a Paula Rego painting, in a run of elegies, in a description of shadowy dealings in Saudi Arabia where “Hydro-carbon hunger / unleashed these beasts / that remorselessly devour / Jeddah’s ancient streets”. Too much here is too flatly anecdotal, but Burt’s relentless sketches are rarely uninteresting, and sometimes brusquely moving. The three chapters of prose memoir, though – the most consistently impressive pieces here – retain many of the more pleasing flourishes of his verse, while revealing a gift for lively mimetic narrative that Burt’s poetry tends to neglect. “Arrogance is the winner’s cancer”, he writes near the start of the first, before candidly showing how in an eviscerating account of life in the often scandalous worlds of law and business in America – and, again, in Saudi Arabia: “Raymond, I’ve told my clients they can’t work under this contract; they’ll leave Saudi first. He sits wordlessly for perhaps thirty seconds, leans slightly towards me, says softly You know, Saudi’s a dangerous place...”.

               Rory Waterman