Richard Burns, who will deliver Leicester Poetry Society’s G S Fraser Lecture on May 9th 2008, is a European poet who writes in English and lives in Cambridge. He was born in London in 1943 into a family of musicians. He has lived in Greece, Italy, the UK, the USA and former Yugoslavia, and travelled widely in other countries.

His perspectives combine English, Mediterranean, Jewish, Slavic, American and Oriental influences. His poems have been translated into 21 languages and he has published more than 20 books. He works internationally with teachers and has delivered poetry workshops in Austria, Bosnia, Croatia, the Czech Republic, India, Italy, Macedonia, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, the UK, the USA and Yakutia. An accomplished linguist, he is especially interested in multilingual and multicultural situations, in universal poetics and in poetry as architecture.

Recent prizes include the Morava International Prize and the Great Lesson Prize (both from Serbia)

He was Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge, 2003-5, and is currently Preceptor at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

In 1975, he launched and ran the now legendary Cambridge Poetry Festival.

Comments on his recent work

“This is real poetry.” Frank Kermode

“A brave and inventive poet attuned to a wider European tradition.”  John Burnside

Website:   http://www.richardburns.eu/site/

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.

Stagnation

Skies slept, or looked
The other way.
Exonerate nobody.

The eye of
Heaven detached.
Justice cataracted.

On earth, men
Slaughtered, fell
And rotted

And the dead
And living dead
Sank deeper in decay.

Darkness flowered
In cruelty. Gracelessness
Numbed hope.

Heaven there, world
Here, and their only
Meeting place, death.

Winter Solstice

It is the year's
Sabbath. Rest,
Take in quietness

From the dammed
Valleys, walled
Canyons, like a bare

Tree's taproots
In darkness. Let
It swell through you

As water gathered
On underground granite
Pools resources

To well upwards
Its meniscus clawing
Slowly at light.

Currents are rising
Beneath earth. Drink
Deep that good water.