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.

The Easter Rising 1967, The Restif Press, Brighton, England.

The Return of Lazarus, Bragora Press, Cambridge.

Double Flute, Enitharmon Press, London.

Avebury, Anvil Press Poetry with Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.

Inhabitable Space, John Morann, Groningen, Holland.

Avebury (Italian edition, tr. Roberto Sanesi), La Nuova Foglio, Macerata, Italy.

Angels, Los Poetry Press, Cambridge. Reprinted 1979 & 1983.

Some Poems, Illuminated by Frances Richards, Enitharmon Press, London.

Learning to Talk, Enitharmon Press, London.

Tree, The Menard Press, London. Spanish edition, 1986, Arbol (tr. Clara Janes) Papeles de invierno, Madrid, Spain; German edition,1989, Baum, (tr. Theo Breuer) Kall-Sistig, Germany.

Roots/Routes, Cleveland State University Poetry Center, Cleveland, USA.

Black Light, Los Poetry Press, Cambridge. Reprinted 1986; and 1995 by The King of Hearts, Norwich. Serbo-Croat edition, Crna Svetlost (tr, Bogdana Bobic), Decje Novine, Gornji Milanovac, Yugoslavia, 1986. German edition: Schwarzes Licht, (tr. Theo Breuer), Bunte Raben Verlag, Germany, 1996. Slovenian edition (tr. Ana Jelnikar, Alef Press, Ljubljana, forthcoming, 2004.

Half of Nowhere, poems (riddles and spells) for children, Cambridge University Press.

Croft Woods, Los Poetry Press, Cambridge.

Against Perfection, The King of Hearts, Norwich.

The Manager, Elliott & Thompson, London & Bath.

Book With No Back Cover, David Paul Press, London.

2004 Crna svetloba (translation of Black Light, tr. Ana Jelnikar), Aleph Publishing, Ljubljana.

U vreme suse ( translation of In a Time of Drought, tr. Vera Radojevic), RAD Publishers, Belgrade.

For the Living, Selected Longer Poems, Salt Publishing, Cambridge. Volume 1 of Selected Writings.

Against Perfection

In this book the reader will discover courage, compassion and hope: a hope beyond optimism and illusions, a compassion stripped of sentimentality and a courage which is the stubborn will to persevere. Against Perfection is a challenge to find within ourselves a response to a poet whose reason takes its cue from the heart.

Learning to Talk: Poems

In these four sequences Burns draws out profound meditations on exile, loss, mortality and transcendence. “Naming the Creatures”, “Witnesses and Angels”, “The Two Gardens” and “The Scope” each display Burns’ mastery of form and tone, moving from immanent horror, exultation in nature and place to atavistic brilliance, hope and renewal, and everywhere filled with contagious pleasure in the sensorium of now.

For the Living

This first volume of Richard Burns’ Selected Writings consists of longer poems written between 1965 and 2000, in Greece, Italy, England and Yugoslavia. Burns’s predominant concerns are love, vision and justice. The keynote is magnanimity. Oppression is confronted and defeated. Personal relations and integrities are affirmed. Eros is celebrated.

The Manager

The Manager is a long poem of a new kind. In presenting the reader with fictional episodes from the life of one man, it offers an account of the disjunctions and contradictions of modern-day living. The text bristles with outrage, anger, obsession, loss and romance, interwoven with passages of a wry, sardonic humour. It merges characters, interactions and drama. Its medium, the ‘verse-paragraph’, enables the reader to capture an impressive range of the registers, inflexions and nuances of contemporary language in all its forms.

Book with No Back Cover

Two beginnings and a middle but no end. Following the I Ching and the Kabbalah, Richard Burns’ new poems focus on nature and light, love and justice, grief and celebration. Burns does not flinch from confronting injustice and horror, whether man-made or natural. Nor does he draw back from questioning death and challenging despair. Yet joy and hope resonate throughout this collection, tumbling and rising into poem after poem. This is a book that flows in waves. It cannot be concluded, only continued.

Ceri Richards & Dylan Thomas: Keys to Transformation

Introduction by Richard Burns. In November 1953, a few hours before the death of Dylan Thomas in New York, the Welsh artist Ceri Richards made a series of forty drawings in a copy of Thomas’s Collected Poems 1934-1952. These were published in facsimile in 1980 by Enitharmon Press with an introduction by Richard Bums, under the title Ceri Richards: Drawings 10 Poems by Dylan Thomas. Ceri Richards was born in 1903 a few miles from Thomas’s own birthplace on the Gower Peninsula, and he died in London in 1971 eighteen years to the day after Thomas. He is now recognised as one of the leading European artists of his time, and Thomas had a far-reaching influence on his mature work.

Croft Woods

In Croft Woods, Burns once more explores the world of plants, using the perspectives and cosmic metaphors of heights and depths. Here, the poem’s fabric is marked, and enriched, by the revealed experience of personal crisis. The setting is “the forest, mother of cathedrals”, where the plants are connected with the souls of the dead, and “colloquies of oxygen and carbon I counterpoint chants of plants and breaths of men.”