Certain Windows

A vivid and unsentimental examination of brutality and the scars it leaves, this collection by London's Dan Burt is a memoir in poetry and prose of his harsh, formative, working-class world. Both elegiac and philosophical, the poems highlight the poet's skill with traditional forms and match the scale of his concerns with a substantial formal architecture and an answerable narrative. Among other retrospections, Burt recalls his father, a powerful, hard, and sympathetic figure with the wisdom of a man of action, yet remains free from sentiment or illusion in his sense of the natural and social worlds.

Dan Burt is an honorary fellow of St. John’s College in Cambridge and the author of Cold Eye and Searched for Text.