Advertised as a chapbook though it has 64 pages. It has pieces from PN Review and the TLS.
There's a 35-page prose autobiography of his early years. The author was born in 1942, Philadelphia, ending up with a Harvard Law degree and a Cambridge (UK) degree. Of his parents, he writes "I never saw them kiss". His father was a US-born child of immigrant Jews, short-tempered, a boxer. He ran a butchers and liked sea-fishing. His mother, non-Jew, was brought up by relatives. Her brother became a Vice Squad detective who did well financially. It was a tough neighbourhood. They had gangster relatives.
As the back cover says, there's a "substantial formal architecture" in the poetry. "Indices" is a sonnet with a tidy plot. The persona's height used to be measured "against a kitchen jamb,/ Head back neck stretched like a young giraffe/ Nibbling high leaves". Later he measured his successes with exams, work and women. But now his body is the physical record of the only important factor - aging.
Elsewhere the architecture is less helpful. When I read
|
Bouts sometimes knocked him head to knees, His swollen gut spewed crimson Shit, he wasted until Crohn's disease Left his great white hope the surgeon. |
I was glad I'd read the autobiography, which explained this more clearly - Crohn's disease didn't leave the surgeon. And I struggled with
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I had Become an alloy skittering across the land Like sodium on water, a vexing man Annealed past reformation as a boy By processes that give fabulists the lie |
I can unravel some of that but having "alloy", "sodium" and "annealed" this close together confuses me.
Other reviews
- Suzi Feay in The Independent on Sunday, December 18, 2011 chose Certain Windows as one of her eight poetry books of the year for Christmas, writing
- George-Szirtes (Certain Windows is a very good book)
- Will-Eaves (Burt is a painstaking and able poet; all of the verse in Certain Windows is enjoyable, and some of it exceptional.
