25 August 2011

The centrepiece of Dan Burt’s second Lintott chapbook collection is a tense, often brilliant prose-memoir of his formative years in the post-war, working-class, Jewish district of South Philadelphia. In particular, it is a portrait of his parents, Joe Burt, the youngest son of a carpenter from the Pale, and Louise Kevitch, the daughter of “tough Jews” who ran the Tenderloin’s numbers racket and its associated prostitution, gambling and protection operations for half a century until the action moved to Atlantic City.

Our sympathies are subtly but firmly directed towards Joe, a brawler and semi-pro boxer whose fights seem emblematic of a wider social and ethnic struggle for survival. “Lust and rage beset his every age”, the author writes, with a feeling mixture of revulsion and pride, before reassuring us that “bullies and every form of authority were [his father’s] targets”. At the age of ten, he fells a lout with a lead pipe. Scarred by the Depression, Joe drops out of school (his brother stays on), becomes a butcher, struggles to keep the family business afloat, but is saved by war-time trade and the deals he cuts with black-market slaughterhouses. Justice is rough. When an anti-profiteering inspector asks to see the coupons for the meat being sold, Joe pitches him through a plate-glass window. When Louise stalls the car in front of a tram and the tram driver insults her “sex, intelligence and parents”, Joe runs to the tram, hauls out the driver and beats him unconscious. A lot of this instinctive, retributive violence is complicated, and in part explained, by its proximity to the Kevitches, a clan of Jacobean monstrosities – and murderers – from whom Joe does his best to shield Dan, but on whom, of course, the family also relies to get Joe off the hook after the defenestration; to pay off the IRS, to “protect” its own faltering respectability. They are a frankly terrifying crowd, shooting state legislators, gunning down delinquents, denying everything, and their mad annexation of mob loyalty to aspirationalism is contagious, so that when Joe finally wins $250 in a crap game and blows it all on a model-train set for his two boys, Dan and Rick, we sense the gesture’s doubleness, the guilt behind the sudden, jarring generosity.

Some of that doubleness also blurs the otherwise transparent style of “Certain Windows”. It is a striking account of intimidation and struggle, for the most part simply told, which would come over as plainly true were it not for Burt’s odd, pre-emptive strike against doubters at the outset: the “dishonesty and danger of romantic reconstruction”, he says, “is reason enough to try and record as accurately as possible what we saw, if we record at all”. It is as if he does not quite believe it all himself, and gives his tale a hint of those voyages extraordinaires whose narrating witnesses, like Watson in the Holmes stories, are always astonished into reporting the wild facts. At the end, too, after a thrilling and moving last chapter devoted to Joe’s second career as a Jersey coast charter captain, the author tells us that his purpose has been to find out “how vision forms, how I come to understand what I do of the world and whether that understanding is sound”. But it isn’t certain that this is what he has done, and there is some collapsing of categories, here. The birth of the adult artist is missing from these pages. Why did the scion of mobsters and a poor meat-trader become a poet? Impossible to tell. Why did he also become a very successful lawyer and high-finance businessman? That much we may deduce.

For the facts, we have a prose recollection; for the truth, or for invention that is true, we turn to the poems that bookend the pamphlet, and which variously foreshadow and echo its themes of brutality and loss. Burt is a painstaking and able poet; all of the verse in Certain Windows is enjoyable, and some of it exceptional. The commemorations of Louise (“Death Mask”) and Joe (“Ishmael”, “Who He Was”, “Trade”), as of the wider American-Jewish experience of self-definition (“John Winthrop’s Ghost”), are formal and learned – but their wealth of allusion, to the myth of Tereus and Procne, to Spartan mothers, to the Old Testament and the authoritarian early history of Massachusetts, never seems forced. They are a part of the “vision” and a proof of Empson’s chatty but shrewd theory that “the reason for writing verse is to clear your own mind and fix your feelings”.

The best poem is called “Rosebud”, after the totemic sled, and uses Burt’s favourite, Tennysonian tetrameter – a tricky rhythm, because it only seems innocent and therefore inclines either to false naivety or irony – to revisit his father’s tenderness. It is a fine narrative elegy, an act of filial invocation couched inside the story of how young Dan coveted and was given a Raleigh bike for his birthday, only to lose it at once:

So long a dream it slipped my mind Till I walked back to school at nine And saw it hanging, bent, flensed, A skeleton on the school fence

Into those simple stresses the verse packs a world of wartime horror, already past but not yet conceivable from the child’s point of view. It’s delicately done. The boy goes home, bikeless, fears punishment and lies awake all night. In the morning, Joe “shook me, eyes red / Free from my twisted covers / To find a second virgin racer”. At this point, Burt relaxes his grip on the meter, its stresses bounced farther apart in longer lines, and with that relaxation comes the right kind of doubleness, for which one feels the poet has long been reaching and searching, and by which he is rewarded – a lovely accuracy of emotional statement that comprehends mystery without trying to understand it:

We never spoke about those Raleighs. Perhaps my desolation recalled the Depression corner where he hawked apples with his father, memory of an older brother pedalling past to high school while he walked to work, or something from his favourite film, Citizen Kane. Now I cannot know. Old myself, when I survey the wreck we make of life he comes to mind and the vessel rights: in balance with what’s worst, two bikes.

WILL EAVES
Poetry Nation Review