Late Self-Portrait

In this volume of Dan Burt’s previously published poetry, Late Self-Portrait selects what the poet wishes to preserve as a whole. Brought together, the collection is about two things – character, and the contrapuntal power of beauty and thought. In rhymed metered lines and traditional forms, including 26 sonnets and 3 short prose excerpts from his memoir, the author exposes roots, education, culture and heterosexual passion under the cosh of history and chance. These poems reveal, examine and judge the brutal, corrosive worlds of butchers, hit men, mobsters, and offshore charter captains. They display the greed, lies, corruption, arrogance and narcissism behind lawyers, businessmen, politicians and generals the author met throughout his time in the US, Europe and the Middle East. But they also counterpoint this dystopia with the redemptive power of the sea, art, learning and women alive and dead whose presences course just below the skin of a now old man walking to his Cambridge College set.