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Shorter PoemsAuthor: Gerald Burns Poetry June 1993 120 pages, 6 x 9 Dimensions: Paperback, 1-56478-026-0 Retail Paperback Price: Our Paperback Price: $7.96—20% OFF! 
Retail Hardcover Price: Our Hardcover Price: $15.96—20% OFF! Hardcover Temporarily Out of Stock |
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Book Description
Gerald Burns is a leading practitioner of the long-lined, thickly textured verse. "These / long lines are long life to us, go back to Kenneth Irby's 'A Set' I saw first in / a flyer from Lawrence, KS where Burroughs chats with Cage whose spitbubbles / may remind us with Zukofsky the heart of the bluebonnet's black. Anyone can learn from anything," he writes, and as these lines from "For J. R. Here" indicate, Burns has learned much: his long, dragnet lines display a lifetime of wide reading and close observation from an astonishing range of subjects.
Widely appreciated as a poet's poet, Burns's appeal is best summarized by one of his fellow poets (Erik Rieselbach): "In an age when most poetry—across the spectrum—is merely decorative, a writer who acknowledges that it is a serious and unique mode of inquiry could not be more welcome. Gerald Burns writes poems that are tough-minded and engaging, palpable and theoretical, allusive and immediate, and above all suffused with the delight of a fiercely intelligent mind mapping out the cultural manifold . . . Burns moves effortlessly among the seemingly most disparate particulars; the effect is kaleidoscopic, even dizzying. But though these poems are dense, they are never obscure, and they generously reward the patient reader with flash after flash of illumination."About the Author
| Gerald Burns was born in 1940 in Detroit, Michigan. He was educated at Harvard, Trinity College (Dublin), and taught at Southern Methodist University and New York University. In 1975 Burns moved to Dallas. In 1985, he was awarded an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship for poetry. Burns's books include Boccherini's Minuet (1972), A Book of Spells (1975), Letters to Obscure Men (1972), A Thing About Language (1989), and Shorter Poems (1993), which was the winner of the 1992 National Series Poetry Competition. In addition to his poetry and prose volumes, Burns also published widely in magazines. He died in 1997 at the age of 57. |  |
Praise
"These extraordinary poems are testament to their author's passionate commitment to all that has entered his mind and heart. He is our great master of detail, of why it is and how it is that the things of our lives constitute a primary index of place. I love the pleasure he so invites, the wit of his insistent response."—Robert Creeley"On some level, I'm stumped by Gerald's poems, even as they continue to fascinate me. What one sees are the eccentric graphings of a mind as it moves through vast erudition. In Gerald's poems, the ideas ramify, traveling on the backs of descriptions so vivid, and intricately sketched, that you seem to watch them (Taung skulls, a wyvern on Wedgewood, quivers, finials) take shape and then veer into something equally unexpected. His poems are full of niches. One encounters the things ideas are found in looked at through a jeweler's loupe, or laid in a row as his sensibility dictates. I keep thinking of William Carlos Williams as an eighteenth-century naturalist—Linnaeus, say, or the Comte de Buffon. There's a love of catalogue, but in a fresh syntax: I don't know how Gerald manages to hint at austerity while presenting such sensuous surfaces, but he does—perhaps it's the way he observes even mundane objects as artifacts. Gerald's poems have long deserved a wider audience, and I'm glad that now they'll have one."—Barbara Jordan
"His work requires a degree of attention that the great mass of contemporary poetry does not; it is complex, wholly unsentimental, and intellectually rich in the breadth of materials it incorporates and utilizes."—Barry Silesky, Southwest Review
"Brilliantly original."—Al Ackerman
"A firm, startling voice speaks—obsessively, obscurely, intelligently. Burns never states; he hints, winks, alludes, conspires. If you can hear the music, you cannot help but dance . . . We read Gerald Burns by taking the plunge, by accepting his voice, his agenda, and his difficulty. We emerge battered and revised."—Donald Hall