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Searched For Text

Dan Burt

Searched For Text
Categories: 21st Century, American
Imprint: Lintott Press
Publisher: Lintott Press
Available as:
Paperback (32 pages)
(Pub. Oct 2008)
9781847770547
Out of Stock
  • Description
  • Excerpt
  • Author
  • Contents
  • Reviews
  • Searched for Text is a first chapbook collection of poems by a poet alive to the challenges of traditional form, finding ways of expressing themes that are intensely real and many-layered in time, culture and society. His elegies, poems of love and landscape, are uneasily sharp and political. He allows no sentimentality to blur the deep sentiment of his experiences: the American childhood and youth, his growing love of England and his finding places in which to be, always a little uneasily, at home. In 'Un Coup de Des' he says:

    Chance authors all we do,
    The plot's contrived in retrospect.
    Spied once I still look out for you;
    Chance authors all we do.
    A sea bird shot, a woman met
    Ungloving who then strolls from view
    Alters to fate as we reflect.
    Chance authors all we do,
    The plot's contrived in retrospect.

    Modern Painters
    Blue Rinse Matron
    Wine Circle
    Slowly Sounds the Bell
    The Lesson
    Compounds
    Circumcision
    Ishmael
    Inquisition
    Dodge Ball
    Poetry Reading
    Facsimile Folio
    Winter Mornings
    Revenant
    Sie Kommt
    End of the Affair
    Decorating the Nursery
    Tart
    Little Black Dress
    Un Coup de Des
    Beside a Cove

    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 ... read more
    '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 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

    'Admirably gutsy and hearty... revealing a gift for lively mimetic narrative'
    Rory Waterman, TLS
     '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
     'Full of hard-won wisdom and beautiful lines, it's testament to the transforming power of poetry.'
    Suzy Feay, the Independent
    This is a major debut. Burt's tough, terse language explores the human truth reached when all protective skin is stripped away.
    Elaine Feinstein, The Times, 26th May 2012.
      '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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