English poet Richard Burns-who prefers, in fact, to be thought of not as an English writer but as a European writing in English-should be better known than he is in the U.S. He has published over a dozen books and chapbooks of poetry (one in the U.S.), edited six anthologies, compiled several prose works, received a fistful of awards, and been translated into ten languages. Now with this new, highly readable collection, no better opportunity exists to become acquainted with his voice. With its variety of thirty-one poems and sequences gathered from across two decades of writing, Against Perfection offers a compelling look into a poet of diverse sensibility-a lyrical poet as adept at shorter forms as he is with meditative verse, a compassionate poet as immersed in matters of human injustice as in private experience, and a self-conscious poet willing to risk sentiment even as he cultivates an ironic sense of grace.

        While his subjects can be complex, ranging from the female figure in Vermeer’s painting The Guitar Player, reproduced on the book’s cover, to the Nazi slaughter of Yugoslavs in 1941, and while his influences can be traced from Orpheus to Seferis, Mandelstam to Thom Gunn, Burns always writes lucidly. At times, his language tends toward Shelleyan abstractions, yet such grand language is generally tempered by quotidian metaphors--as in these lines near the opening of “May”:

                                            It’s May.
The World anoints my whole body in glory,
But I’m not drunk on you yet, world, although I’m trying,
Knocking each breath back like a double brandy
Because your body’s beauty strikes terror through me,
As death blows through the fences, spreading pollen. . .

        Similarly, Burns displays his talent for forms, from the elegy to the villanelle, the eclogue to the prose poem. He writes as seamlessly as Auden, another of his influences, yet his facility is not merely for show, but rather (again, as for Auden) to address specific persons, lending an intimate tone to his poems. “Against the Day,” for example, celebrates not only Vermeer’s portrait but the poet’s daughter’s eighteenth birthday. “May” delves into his faint memories of his Yiddish cellist father, who died when the poet was only four; digging into his past, he hopes, will provide his own two children an “accurate testimony of what I knew and loved,” as part of their “heritage, this litany of sadnesses/ Borne on the lilac’s perfume, whispering through my mind.” In his selections from Black Light, a sequence set in Greece, Burns’s understated voice creates the impression of our eavesdropping on a private conversation:

it’s not much to ask, only the common miracle, but people like you and me have been traveling
like this for years, along the same dirt track through the same city streets the same weary beds,
foreign in our own country, no longer recognising the speech of men or women we know, of
our own flesh,
So how then can we be expected to converse with angels or even with old friends, long dead,
let alone speak the language of love, let alone the language of love?
                                                                                                                (“Only the Common Miracle”)

        Besides their abiding concern with private relationships and spirituality, Burns’s poems are obsessed with time, an obsession made explicit in the sonnet “Give Time,” but evident throughout: “Time is an arrow, not a boomerang” (“After Eternity: a dialogue”); “If, now and then, time moves like an indifferent clock,/It is not so always. Time too changes time. One day/Is a rich chaos unlike any other” (“Nothing is lost always”). With its ability to induce forgetting, decay, loss and death, time seems the prime mover behind human imperfection; it reveals both our frailty and our ignorance. Much of the emotion in Burns’s poems grows out of their struggle between their longing for grace and their sobering awareness of our many failures.

        No poems better illustrate his attempt to redeem the failures time precipitates than those from The Blue Butterfly, whose “historical point of departure,” Burns notes, “was a Nazi massacre of Yugoslav men and boys in the Serbian town of Kragujevac on 21st October 1941,” but whose poignance reflects on the violence still plaguing that part of the Balkans. Three of the eight poems here are haunting villanelles seeking hope in a hopeless context, as in, “The Death of Children,” where the repeated lines argue a parent’s view: “What justice is, nobody comprehends./It is the death of children most offends.” And without flinching, “Statement by a Survivor,” using an intricate rhetoric and rhyme that invoke Auden’s “September 1939" or Gunn’s poems about AIDS, attempts to reconcile the damaged lives of those who have survived violence with those who have not:

Though we who breathe and live
Our small time on this ground
Forget but can’t forgive,
Still must our dead surround
Us all with constant flame,
And pass out keys or clues
And prompt us with their cues,
And traces we cannot name
Of memory and desire
Consume us in their fire.

        For all its entanglement in failure, Against Perfection is finally a testament to what the human spirit can cherish. Like the speaker in “Guests” (a poem that should be placed next to the Gideon’s Bibles in hotels and inns everywhere), Burns concedes that “we have no needs or preferences/ especially out of the ordinary,” so that once we depart, “Dawn’s shadows will efface us/and by noon we shall have left/ no ripple on the surface of memory.” Nonetheless, intrigued as he is by time’s erasures, Richard Burns never loses sight of “how perfection leaks from cracks in the bowl of now” (“I will speak”). And for all of its acknowledgment of our deficiencies, of the injustices that litter our history, of the “domes of ashes in the mouth” (“God has not moved a furlong”) that keep us from singing, Against Perfection urges us to love, especially to love the world nature has given us, with the same fierce tenderness we feel for those we are closest to. Such a love comes from “trusting in the heights and depths of things” (“Croft Woods”); such a love, no matter its flaws, “cannot grow, die, be reborn. It is.”

-John Gery, University of New Orleans