Carcanet Press Logo
Quote of the Day
It is impossible to imagine literary life in Britain without Carcanet.
William Boyd

Certain Windows

Dan Burt

Certain Windows
Imprint: Lintott Press
Publisher: Lintott Press
Available as:
Paperback (72 pages)
(Pub. Apr 2011)
9781847771612
Out of Stock
  • Description
  • Author
  • Reviews
  • Certain Windows is Dan Burt’s second chapbook collection. It includes poems, sequences and the title prose, a vivid memoir evoking a harsh formative world. Among others, the poet’s father comes alive here and in the poems, a powerful, hard and sympathetic figure with the wisdom of the man of action.

    Dan Burt is a master of traditional forms, memorable lines, which continue accruing sense and pleasure with each reading. The scale of his concerns is matched, in the sequences, by a substantial formal architecture, and an answerable narrative informs each poem. In Certain Windows the dominant notes are elegiac and philosophical and he is rigorously unsentimental in his retrospects and unillusioned in his sense of the natural and social worlds.
    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
     '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
    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
    '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 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
Share this...
The Carcanet Blog Baby Schema: Isabel Galleymore read more The Iron Bridge: Rebecca Hurst read more Sleepers Awake: Oli Hazzard read more The Miraculous Season: V.R. 'Bunny' Lang, edited by Rosa Campbell read more Egg/Shell: Victoria Kennefick read more The Devil Prefers Mozart: Anthony Burgess read more
Find your local bookshop logo
Arts Council Logo
We thank the Arts Council England for their support and assistance in this interactive Project.
This website ©2000-2024 Carcanet Press Ltd