Work without Hope: Poetry by John Burt (Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction) - Hardcover

Burt, Professor John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801853710 ISBN 13: 9780801853715

Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996

Synopsis

The poems in John Burt's newest collection aspire to record something of what Wordsworth called "the still sad music of humanity," that ability to endure the limitations of the world--and the folly of one's own desires and ambitions in it--until one arrives, beyond disappointment or defeat, at a kind of lucid and reflective acceptance of experience with all of its shades.

The poems are grouped thematically. The first part contains a series of nocturnes about death. The second includes testy confrontations with strangers. The third treats characters faced with moral challenges beyond their capacities. All of these concerns are at play in the long narrative, "Anna Peterson," a true story, which the author has set at the thematic and emotional center of the book.

"I intend these poems," Burt writes, "to be chastened by irony but not silenced by it, aware of the complexities of love and aspiration but not soured by them. Most of these poems are narratives in blank verse, and some of them have to do with historical figures. Despite the bleakness of the book's assumptions about the course of life, I mean always to honor the inner lives of the characters I write about, who mostly face inevitable things with courage and even spirit. The difficulties the characters face are for the most part unresolvable, but they bring to those difficulties a clarity which is almost if not quite redemptive, a clarity I hope is present in the formal and stylistic poise of even the darkest sections of the book."

About this title

About the Author

John Burt is associate professor of English and American Literature, Brandeis University. He is the author of The Way Down and Robert Penn Warren and American Idealism. His poems have appeared in such literary periodicals as Salmagundi, Yale Review, and Paris Review.

Review

1938
Aboard The Californian
Anna Peterson (ashfield, Massachusetts, February, 1849)
At Mount Pleasant
Barren Season
Charles Capers (st. Helena Island, S.c., 1815)
Common Ground (outside Brigham And Women's Hospital)
The Crickets
Dead Boy
Elizabeth Keckley (new York, 1866)
Ice Storm
The Immortality Of Poetry
Jim Slocum
Little Girl Alone With Doll
Love And Fame
Mary's Gift
The Match
Night On The River Queen
Of The Surrender To Sleep
Parking Downtown
Peace In Our Time
The Personal Memoirs Of U.s. Grant
The Phantom Arm
Prelude
The Rake's Progress
The Sandbar
Sapphics
A Small Animal
The Stair
Starbuck's Watch
Thomas Chaplin
Travelers
Viglius Zuichemus
What Ellen Said
Work Without Hope (1946)
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

John Burt's second book of poems is full of dramatic monologues, compressed storytelling, and workmanlike sonnets. He is a poet who could not exist without Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson, and for whom nothing much has happened since they died; his least-ambitious lyrics take few chances, but his best blank-verse anecdotes are as sturdily alive as the ginkgo, as unshowily useful as umbrellas or nails. These frequently historical poems (some carry dates: 1534, 1866, 1953) star isolates, adventurers, and lonely souls surprised by their own weakness. Among the sidelined antiheroes are the Californian's becalmed sailors, "dead on the water," watching the Titanic sink all night; a Cambridge lady puzzled by a hardworking tramp; Chamberlain back from Munich, "stiff and ridiculous, an angry sparrow," protesting "I bought the world a year"; and the airfield workers of "1938," whose cowardice precipitates a blimp accident impossible to summarize or forget.
Copyright © 1996, Boston Review. All rights reserved. -- From The Boston Review

Edition details

• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0801853710
• ISBN 13: 9780801853715
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80