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Dan Burt

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  • Dan Burt was born in 1942 in South Philadelphia. He graduated from LaSalle College a Philadelphia working class college, read English at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and received his law degree from Yale Law School in 1969. He was a lawyer, businessman, and Honorary Fellow of St. John’s when he began to publish poetry in 2008. Carcanet Press published four books of his poetry and prose (2008 – 2019), and Marlborough Graphics/Lintott Press a poetry and photography collaboration with Paul Hodgson (2010). Notting Hill Press brought out his brief childhood memoir, You Think It Strange, in the UK (2014), as did Overlook Press in the US (2015). His work has appeared in The Financial Times, The Sunday Times, The New Statesman, Commonweal, TLS, Granta, PN Review, Clutag Press, other newspapers, periodicals, and anthologies, and been featured on the BBC. He lives and writes in London, Cambridge, and Schooner Head, Maine.

    www.danburtpoetry.com

    Author photo taken by Paul Hodgson


    Praise for Dan Burt 'I was deeply moved by Every Wrong Direction; it is filled with courage, honesty and grace - and quite a bit of sheer page turning thrill. Burt tells it all beautifully and poignantly and what lingers is an impression of exemplary intelligence and daring.'

    Alain de Botton

    'Dan Burt is a fine poet, and this memoir has all the sensitivity and vigilance you might expect from a writer with such a background. But his prose also has a robustness and documentary power that continually startles and engages.'

    Sir Andrew Motion

     'Dan Burt's 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 the twentieth century and a lifetime in a non-literary world, is of '€˜the curtain falling on the Enlightenment'.'
    Elaine Feinstein
    'His language is terse to the point of brutality; the verbs ferocious... his core conviction, formed by the history of the twentieth century and a lifetime in a non-literary world, is of "the curtain falling on the Enlightenment".' Elaine Feinstein, PN Review  'the verse flexes muscle after muscle. Burt is excellent on place and occasion... The writing... can hover and dance. It has genuine grace. Certain Windows is a very good book...'
    George Szirtes, Poetry Book Society
      'Dan Burt investigates the gaps between people, their cultures, their places of living. Between new and old worlds, between lives of deprivation and comfort, between inner and outer selves, there is something gritty and disturbing working away. From cynicism and anger to deeply felt and even traumatic elegy, these are the revelations and considerations of a life and the lives that contribute to and make one's own. In poems and prose that reach deep down into the reservoir of human loss, distress and need, comes hope. He is a writer of intensity and passion who is able to be wry when needs be. There are the costs, but there is also renewal.'
    John Kinsella
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