Layers

The poetry of Harry Burrus is highly diverse. It reveals the importance of visual imagery and movement in his imagination. In some of his poems, there are echoes of images experienced in the open street and of the close connection between everyday life, the written world, collages and art that were so important to Surrealist writers such as Andre Breton and Ted Joans. Shades of Breton's Nadja, Louis Aragon's Le Paysan de Paris, and Phillippe Soupault's Les Dernieres Nuit de Paris are visible in his Paris poems. His poems of love are often poems of inquiry-a search for compassion and understanding of the other in a confused world. The quest at the heart of Harry Burrus' poetry is not merely a traversing of space and cultures, but also of time and of depth. He seeks to capture love in its various manifestations and to understand its mutability. Whether it is the love that is overwhelming in its simplicity and naturalness, as expressed in the poem "Song," or the shards of uncertainty and disintegration in "A Game of Rules," we feel that Harry Burrus has a profound understanding of the diversity and complexity of human connection-and our inner fragility. In fragments of momentary experience, he manages to capture truths that are universal about people and relationships. He insists on the difficulty, though never the impossibility, of truly coming face to face with another person. He is intensely aware that this only becomes possible in a naked awareness of our true selves and by making ourselves vulnerable to defeat. The same penetrating gaze is focused on places and diverse cultures. Many of his poems are informed by an awareness of other traditions. In one of his most beautiful poems "I Do Not Sleep With Strangers" we witness the transformation of an American into a cosmological being through his exposure to Buddhist thought and the purity of transcendental experience.

If you read the poems of Harry Burrus attentively you will realize that this is a poet of extraordinary vision, a modern day renaissance man, who draws upon a full palette of poetic styles to depict a picture of modern man and woman in all their complexity. He is aware that universal truths can be found in the most banal of experiences, if we can but perceive them. Harry Burrus knows that in each experience we also have the ability to recreate and reorient ourselves and the world around us. This is a poetry of vulnerability but also of hope, suffused with powerful imagery and a vivid imagination that never loses sight of the divine spirit within Man. Layers is the first major retrospective of his entire poetic career and, as such, offers an invaluable insight into one of our finest American poets.

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