August 2016.

The Times Literary Supplement (TLS) includes Worship on their permanent on-line website as a poem of the week.

Poem of the week
‘Worship’
‘I idolized three simple men, / the seaman Holmes, the boxer Joe, / the hit-man Uncle Al’

IN THIS REVIEW
A poem by Dan Burt; introduced by Andrew McCulloch

“We trail no clouds of glory when we come. We trail blood, a cord that must be cut and post-partum mess that mix with places, people, and stories to frame the house of childhood. We dwell in that house forever.”
These words are from Dan Burt’s memoir You Think It Strange (2013), in which he describes what it was like to grow up in south Philadelphia in the 1940s and 50s. His father was a butcher and his mother was part of the Kevitch family which ruled the notorious Tenderloin district of the town – its prostitution, gambling, contract murders, loan-sharking and political corruption – for half a century.

Burt went to the University of Cambridge in 1964 to read English, graduated in law from Yale in 1969, went on to practise in the United States, Great Britain and Saudi Arabia, and became a British citizen in 2001. George Szirtes compared We Look Like This (2012), Burt’s first collected edition of poetry and prose, to Robert Lowell’s Life Studies (1959), finding echoes of Lowell’s “complex relationship with his ruling class ancestry” in Burt’s “tough elegies” for his “sometimes violent but fiercely determined father”. This week’s poem, “Worship”, first published in the TLS in 2014, also explores Burt’s attitude towards his family and upbringing. He begins by idolizing the rough-and-ready role models of his childhood – the seaman, the boxer, the hit-man. And even if his adult encounters have made him more ambivalent about glamorous outlaws – “double- / dipping bureaucrats, bent lawyers / peacock generals” – his heroes will always be “cowboys”. “The cord must be cut”, perhaps, but we dwell in “the house of childhood” forever.