Biographical note: Richard Burns was born in London in 1943, into a family of musicians. He has lived in Italy, Greece, the USA and Yugoslavia. His perspectives as a poet combine English, French, Mediterranean, Jewish, Slavic, American and Oriental influences. He deals equally with historical and political material, with inner worlds, and with relationships and everyday life. In the 1970’s, he founded and ran the (now almost legendary) international Cambridge Poetry Festival. His work has been translated into 18 languages.
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EAN13: 9781844712588 ISBN-10: 1844712583 ISBN-13: 9781844712588 Author: Richard Burns Title: The Blue Butterfly Series: Salt Modern Poets Product class: BC Language: eng Audience: General/trade BIC subject category: CTCH1 Publisher: Salt Publishing Pub date: 15-Jul-06 Extent: 168pp Height: 216 mm Width: 140 mm Thickness: 10 mm Weight: 252 gms Supplier:Gardners Books Supplier:Ingram Book Group Supplier:Inbooks (James Bennett) Availability: IP Price: GBP 10.99 Price: USD 17.95 Rights: World
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description/annotation:WINNER OF THE WINGATE PRIZE. Taking its departure from both the Nazi massacre at Kragujevac in former Yugoslavia in 1941, and a moment at the memorial museum in 1985, when a blue butterfly descended onto Burns’ writing hand, this profound book crafts living poetry out of suffering and tragedy. Passionate and thoughtful, demanding and rewarding, this moral and joyous work is European in context but universal in scope and relevance.
Main description:WINNER OF THE WINGATE PRIZE. The Blue Butterfly has two points of departure. The first is a Nazi massacre in former Yugoslavia. On 21 October 1941, seven thousand men and boys from Kragujevac, a town in central Serbia, were marched out to the nearby hills and gunned down. The poet Richard Burns visited the site of this atrocity, on 25 May 1985. As he was queuing to enter the memorial museum, a blue butterfly descended onto the forefinger of his writing hand. This extraordinary and powerful book takes off from these two episodes. The title poem is already famous in former Yugoslavia in the translation by Danilo Kiš and Ivan V. Laliç. In Serbia, Burns has recently been honoured with the international Morava Prize for Poetry. In the UK, an early unpublished draft of this sequence was awarded the Wingate-Jewish Quarterly Prize in 1992. The Blue Butterfly unflinchingly explores both revenge and forgiveness, expanding from the Balkan historical context to the present time. The complete book has been a long time in the making. Because it examines profound and important issues, because it does not flinch from asking large questions, because it shapes a crafted, vital, living poetry out of suffering and tragedy, and because it insists on hope and pleads for joy, this is a book which has moral implications on many levels. Both passionate and thoughtful, demanding and rewarding, it is European in context and universal in scope and relevance.
For more than twenty years Richard Burns has maintained a close involvement with life, culture and politics in the Balkans, especially Greece and former Yugoslavia. He lived and worked in Yugoslavia between 1987 and 1991, immediately before the wars that broke that country apart. Out of this have come two books, and a third is on the way. Of these three, The Blue Butterfly is the centrepiece. To be published in June 2006 by Salt Publishing, Cambridge, is it also the second volume in Burns's ongoing series of Selected Writings.
Table of contents: 1. THE BLUE BUTTERFLY Stagnation Two documents Don’t send bread tomorrow The blue butterfly Nada : hope or nothing The telling War again : Yugoslavia 1991 2. THE DEATH OF CHILDREN The death of children There is no comfort Bloody in vengeance A hollow dream Something more? There is scant hope Clean out the house 3. SEVEN WREATHS First wreath Second wreath Third wreath Fourth wreath Fifth wreath Sixth wreath Seventh wreath 4. SEVEN SONGS OF THE DEAD The shadow well When night covered Europe Ballad of the seagull: the schoolboy From Mauthausen The conquerors To his daughter, mourning Unmarked voices from a mass grave 5. SEVEN STATEMENTS OF SURVIVORS This country weighs so heavy The untouchables In silence : the mourner Wayside shrine Traces we cannot name A twentieth century dream Diagonal 6. FLIGHT OF THE IMAGO Nothing is lost always The future recoils The dead do not hear us What power or intelligence Conversation between a butterfly and a murdered man What then is singing? And what dancing? Things fall into place retrospectively 7. SEVEN BLESSINGS The burning butterfly The corners of the mouth What seemed impossible Signet ring True to your absence, glory Shalom Grace Photographs and last messages Postscript Notes
On my Jew’s hand, born out of ghettos and shtetls, raised from unmarked graves of my obliterated people in Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia,
on my hand mothered by a refugee’s daughter, first opened in blitzed London, grown big through post–war years safe in suburban England,
on my pink, educated, ironical left hand of a parvenu not quite British pseudo gentleman which first learned to scrawl its untutored messages
among Latin–reading rugby–playing militarists in an élite boarding school on Sussex’s green downs and against the cloister walls of puritan Cambridge,
on my hand weakened by anomie, on my writing hand, now of a sudden willingly stretched before me in Serbian spring sunlight,
on my unique living hand, trembling and troubled by this May visitation, like a virginal leaf new sprung on the oldest oak in Europe,
on my proud firm hand, miraculously blessed by the two thousand eight hundred martyred men, women and children fallen at Kragujevac,
a blue butterfly simply fell out of the sky and settled on the forefinger of my international bloody human hand.
Unpublished endorsement : This is real poetry. The whole book is an extremely impressive achievement.
Frank Kermode
Unpublished endorsement : One of the chief functions of poetry is commemoration: the poet tries to make a shape in language to perpetuate the passing moment of which the poet, the poet’s family and nation, and ever further, echoing ever more distantly, the whole human race is a part. But the human race does terrible things and suffers terrible things. Any murder is a crime. A massacre is a particularly heinous crime, and the event recalled here, a massacre of children is beyond words.
Or would be. Richard Burns has written an entire book of poems on the massacre at Kragujevac in October 1941. In various forms (sonnets, villanelles, terza rima and many others) and in various sections ranging from song and lament for the specific event, through the registering of the experiences of survivors, to metaphysical and philosophical questionings and short elegies, he gives shape to a moment apparently far in time and space. The figure of the small blue butterfly (a perfectly real butterfly as the photograph shows) is the impulse, the movement of whose wings starts a storm across half a world.
Epic poems are rare. This is one. Richard Burns is one of the major half-hidden poets of England. The book is a monument: vivid, grave, sorrowful, angry and powerfully constructed, a human act of commemoration.
George Szirtes
Unpublished endorsement : I admire this book deeply. Delicately and rightly, it balances grief, joy, guilt, wonder and blessing. The ‘lacing’ of the poems into their contexts by the use of archival material, documents and photographs, works to mesh the poems back into history, but also to mesh history back into the present. It is a book which burns with ‘quiet fire’.
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