Gerald Burns is a leading practitioner of 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.
Publishers Weekly,A literary critic as well as a poet, Burns ( A Thing About Language ) offers poems that read like the doctoral dissertation of a crazed English literature student. Pope, Marianne Moore, Blake, Tennyson, Dryden, Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Auden and Byron are mentioned in the first four poems alone. Even a poem about shaving his beard, which has a promising beginning (``A face like a pillow twisted in illness / is what I see'') deteriorates quickly into thoughts about ``poets describing parental reflection in bathroom mirror.'' When not inspired by literature, Burns looks to the art world: George Segal, Rauschenberg, Durer, Vermeer, Ruskin, etc. Such name-dropping, along with a run-on, hapazard surrealism, suggests comparison with New York School poets. But Burns's chopped up prose lines contain none of the lyricism that distinguishes the best work of John Ashbery or Kenneth Koch. Though he obviously delights in wordplay, the resulting poems are nothing more than linguistic exercises. And, as if the poems aren't dense enough in their own right, the publisher has elected to crowd them together, making reading next to impossible in the finished book. This disappointing volume was selected by Robert Creeley for the National Poetry Series. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
