Richard Berengarten

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Biographical note:  Richard Berengarten was born in London into a family of musicians. He has lived in Italy, Greece, Serbia, Croatia and the USA. He now lives in Cambridge, where he is a Bye-Fellow at Downing College. A former Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund, he has published more than 25 books.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844714582
ISBN:  9781844714582
Author:  Richard Berengarten
Title:  The Blue Butterfly
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  23-Nov-08
Extent:  176pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  17 mm
Weight:  264 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 14.99
Price:  USD 26.95
Rights:  World

See also

Richard Berengarten
For the Living

Richard Berengarten
The Manager

Richard Berengarten
In a Time of Drought

Richard Berengarten
Under Balkan Light

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 In the UK, an early unpublished draft of this sequence was awarded the Wingate-Jewish Quarterly Prize in 1992.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.

The Blue Butterfly has received the Great School Lesson Award in Serbia. An early version won the Wingate-Jewish Quarterly Award in the UK. It forms the first part of his Balkan Trilogy and is published together with the other two parts, In a Time of Drought and Under Balkan Light. This edition is also the third volume in the Salt series of his Selected Writings.

Richard Berengarten used to be known as RICHARD BURNS. With the publication of this book, he now repossesses the family name of his father, the cellist and saxophonist Alexander Berengarten.

Table of contents:
Illustrations
Editorial Note
Acknowledgements
1 The blue butterfly
Stagnation
Two documents
Don't send bread tomorrow
The blue butterfly
Nada : hope or nothing
The telling
War again
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
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 blue butterfly and a murdered man at one of the entrances to the Underworld
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
Last Messages
Postscript
Notes

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Excerpt from book:  

The blue butterfly

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’.

Robert MacFarlane

Unpublished endorsement:  The Blue Butterfly carves words of condemnation and disgust, inscribes question marks and exclamation marks, utters lamentations for victims and intones elegies among those who have survived.

Aleksandar Petrov

Review quote:  The Blue Butterfly is a magnificent book. The volume is suffused with hope and bravery; and examines ethnic cleansing and mass hatred in a way that is particularly relevant.

Poetry Review