We Look Like This, Dan Burt's first full
collection (which includes poems from, and greatly expands on, pamphlets
he has published in the past five years with Michael Schmidt's Lintott
Press), meets his own childhood and family history head-on. Born to a
violent if admirably driven father whose parents escaped murder by
Ukrainian Cossacks, and a distant mother whose family were "tough Jews"
living on the edge of the law, Burt's was a gritty upbringing in South
Philadelphia. We Look Like This maps his escape from these
harsh environs - working as a youngster in the family butcher's shop
from dawn till dusk; viewing his parents' marriage as "a bare knuckle
fight to the death" - first to Cambridge, England, where he read
English, then to Yale and a career in law. Mixing working-class roots
and mean streets with college cloisters and Ivy League privilege, Burt
is forever trying to make sense of his many-sided identity, though in a
commendably unsolipsistic way. "All the dark years haunt me", reflects
one poem, "Not what happened.../ but warnings missed / because I could not
gauge what others felt".
In terms of its structure and themes, We Look Like This mimics, in conscious fashion, that most influential of post-war American volumes in poetry, Robert Lowell's Life Studies
(1959). Like Lowell, Burt favours muscular verse, typically loosely
metred and rhymed; this serves as an effective means of dealing with
some raw emotional material, though as in Lowell, the brassy sonics can
sometimes drown out the poetry. The poems are arranged either side of a
meaty prose memoir, "Certain Windows", which parallels Lowells "91
Revere Street", though where Lowell wrestled with his elite ancestry and
childhood memories of Sunday dinners with naval officcers, Burt posits
his immigrant heritage, and a world of feuds, fights and shadowy deals
in which he grew up fast. Burt is, he states, keen to avoid "romantic
reconstruction", trying instead, "to record as accurately as possible",
and whatever misgivings we might have about the practicalities of such
claims, the approach yields some undoubtedly gripping results. Take
Burt's description of his father Joe, the book's complex central
character, whose "lust and rage beset his every age" and "fists rose at
the slightest provocation", or of Philadelphia's old town, where
"prostitution, gambling, fencing, contract murder, loan sharking,
political corruption and crime of every sort were the daily trade". It
is a consistently absorbing account, even as it segues into slightly
more serene territory, recalling Burt's father's passion in later life
for coastal fishing. "Trade", one of a number of poems that recast these
prose scenes in verse, vividly captures this elemental expanse:
And pause - to watch sedge sway on flats,
Geese rise honking from wetland choirs,
The sun decline, a whirl of gnats
And the Light flick on at Barnegat.
Arranged into sections, the poems make up around two-thirds of We Look Like This.
They move from touching elegies to Burt's parents, through punchy yet
comtemplative sonnets that mingle childhood, community and (specifically
Jewish) history, to reflections on old age and death, and the stories
traced in people's faces and familiar places. Engaged and often engaging
as they are, an appetite for the click-shut end-rhyme can lead to
clumsy syntax and lines that are rhythmically askew - a particular
problem in section five, a series exploring the shifting emotional
terrain of a love affair. The book might have been more powerful for
some pruning of its slighter pieces. Yet if Burt sometimes seems more
straightjacketed than at home in his tighter forms, when they come off
they make for compelling reading. "Modern Painters" is Burt at his best,
examining in pulsing, rhymed octets the thickly impasto'd painting by
Frank Auerbach that is reproduced on the book's jacket. Here, as
elsewhere, the writing lays bare the sometimes brutal face of humanity,
while striving for sense and understanding:
We look like this after things fall apart;
The painting is an autopsy report
From an inquest where war took the part
Of coroner.
first published in the Times Literary Supplement, August 10 2012