Most Read... Rebecca WattsThe Cult of the Noble Amateur
(PN Review 239)
John McAuliffeBill Manhire in Conversation with John McAuliffe
(PN Review 259)
Patricia CraigVal Warner: A Reminiscence
(PN Review 259)
Eavan BolandA Lyric Voice at Bay
(PN Review 121)
Vahni CapildeoOn Judging Prizes, & Reading More than Six Really Good Books
(PN Review 237)
Christopher MiddletonNotes on a Viking Prow
(PN Review 10)
Next Issue Kirsty Gunn re-arranges the world John McAuliffe reads Seamus Heaney's letters and translations Chris Price's 'Songs of Allegiance' David Herman on Aharon Appelfeld Victoria Moul on Christopher Childers compendious Greek and Latin Lyric Book Philip Terry again answers the question, 'What is Poetry'
Poems Articles Interviews Reports Reviews Contributors
Reader Survey
PN Review Substack

This review is taken from PN Review 188, Volume 35 Number 6, July - August 2009.

Elaine FeinsteinEMERGING TALENTS DAN BURT, Searched for Text (Lintott Press) £7.95

Dan Burt’s Searched for Text is a short book, little more than a pamphlet with a spine, but the 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’.

An American, and in any case too young to have felt the menace of the Holocaust directly, he is obsessed by the evidence it offers of human callousness; rather as in the paintings of R.B. Kitaj, that knowledge underpins his poetry. And the suffering of his fellow Jews spans generations. In ‘Circumcision’ a forebear leans over at the moment of the ritual snip to say: ‘For him our suffering began today’.

He writes well of old Turkish Baths, where towelled Jews lie in rows after bathing; to the eye of his imagination they resemble corpses after a Cossack raid. He wonders if the sight would have been the same in Odessa before the Second World War, or in Toledo before the Inquisition. As the present-day bathers lie there comfortably, they ponder Arendt’s question: Why didn’t the Jews fight? Burt is a harsh witness, but not only of others. ‘Slowly Sounds The Bell’ speaks frankly of the death of a brother, and confesses his indifference on hearing of it; and perhaps worse than indifference, as he suggests in the last couplet:
...


Searching, please wait... animated waiting image