cover image Shorter Poems

Shorter Poems

Gerald Burns. Dalkey Archive Press, $19.95 (112pp) ISBN 978-1-56478-025-6

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)