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Review: Certain Windows by Dan Burt

Dan Burt, Certain Windows (Lintott Press, £9.95)
Reviewed by George Szirtes


Dan Burt's book, Certain Windows, offers a mirror to Robert Lowell's 1959 book, Life Studies, in that it is directly set in the world of the poet's childhood and is written in muscular verse (often but not always rhymed, moving on light feet around the hard core of pentameter) with a long central section in prose. Burt's prose piece, ‘Certain Windows' parallels Lowell's '91, Revere Street'. The very form of the book - poems, prose, poems - invites comparison.

Burt comes from quite a different background from Lowell. Lowell's Boston ancestors could be traced back to the Mayflower and include politicians, poets, theologians: people generally referred to as Brahmins. Like Lowell's family the Burts, who were not yet Burts but Russian Jews, arrived by boat, but much later, in 1915 or 1916, grandfather Zaida escaping pogroms and conscription into the Russian army. Those members of the family who remained behind were killed. Ancestry is important. Burt's central section begins with a nod to both Wordsworth and Lowell, declaring: ‘We trail no clouds of glory when we come'. The first numbered section within the prose is quite knowingly titled: Ancestral Houses.

Not clouds of glory perhaps, but plenty of action and prominence. Yiddish is the first family language. Zaida and his wife keep the feasts without much sense of religious belief. Burt describes his grandfather as ‘an ethnic realist'. Burt's father, Joe, was, like Lowell, born in Boston but moved with his parents to South Philadelphia the year after. A small man but a tough guy, he was not to be pushed around and kept a butcher's shop. Mother's family, the Kevitch's, were real powers in the neighbourhood, living at the edges of the law, but also having a foot inside it with Uncle Milt a Republican state legislator. There are scams, tangles with the police, hard talk, hard action. It's at the opposite end of the social scale from the Lowells, Hutchinsons and Winslows. South Philadelphia is a bruising place to grow up in. Like Lowell, Burt deals with addresses. Lowell had ‘Memories of West Street and Lepke' Burt has Fourth and Daly. The parallels go on. The Lowells are associated with the navy, the Burts, in later life, with fishing. The sea feeds both.

As it does the poems, although the context naturally varies. Lowell's prose piece is flanked by poems about historical and literary figures, and the section called Life Studies comes at the end. Burt has a couple of poems with strong cultural references (Citizen Kane and T S Eliot among them) at the top but he begins with ‘Death Mask', a poem set in terms of Ancient Greece in memoriam his mother,: ‘Dear Spartan mother why did you send me / To the Apothetae alone among your children?' and referring to Ishmael, about his father, reminding us of both the Bible and Melville. All these establish the cultural hinterland. It is the last of the first four poems which registers his aim and quarrel. The quarrel is with Eliot's notion of Bleistein: the aim is to reclaim the cultural sphere in terms of Jewishness. The end poems pick up the strands. ‘John Winthrop's Ghost' calls to Lowell's Uncle Devereux Winslow. In other words the agon with Lowell persists to the end. As if to say, ‘Here you are, Robert Lowell, with your grand ancestors, and here am I, Dan Burt, with mine.'

It is a noble agon and the verse flexes muscle after muscle. Burt is excellent on place and occasion. ‘Texaco Saturday Afternoon Opera' begins:

Talk sputters out, house lights lower,
A white wand rises with the scrim
And I see Chick not Lohengrin
White coat and apron amid clutter
Salt beef, herrings, dills in brine,
Rye bread piles three feet high
Crusted with mountaineering flies...

The tetrametric lines bulge with energy. There is energy too in the way the image of Burt's father is recalled in ‘Who He Was': ‘He catapulted from his armchair, / airborne for an instant, primed to smash / the fledgling power who dared challenge / his rule'. It is masculine writing celebrating a masculine sense of temper and purpose. The writing isn't always as musclebound as this: it can hover and dance. It has genuine grace.

Certain Windows is a very good book that should be read with Lowell's Life Studies in the other hand. The two address each other through the reader's head.


Born in Hungary and arriving in England in 1956, George Szirtes is a prolific writer who has produced 16 plays and musicals, and many translations and poetry collections, including most recently The Burning of the Books and Other Poems (published by Bloodaxe in 2009) and Reel, which won the 2004 T S Eliot Prize. He also has a New and Collected Poems, published in 2008.