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.