In a White Light

by Michael Burkard

Genres: Poetry

50 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1977

About the author

He graduated from Hobart College and from the Iowa Writers' Workshop with an MFA in 1973. He taught at Kirkland College (1975–78) and Sarah Lawrence College (1983–84, 1986–87), and has taught in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at Syracuse University since 1997. He has been a visiting writer at New York University (1991) and the University of Louisville (1992, 1996), as well as a writer-in-residence at Austin Peay State University (1990). During the 1990s he has also worked as an alcoholism counselor, particularly with children whose lives have been impacted by alcoholism. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review,The Paris Review, Ploughshares, APR, Ironwood, and Quarterly West.

Reviews

[Brett · Rating 3 out of 5]

All art is by its nature subjective, but perhaps no more so than poetry, which can speak so strongly to some while hardly registering at all with others. I try periodically to expose myself to modern poets, sometimes with great results, and other times leaving me cold.

In all honesty, I had a difficult time connecting with many of these poems. They tend to be on the longer side and lack the narrative accessibility that seems to be helpful to me in finding an emotional resonance. I say this less as a real criticism of the poems, and more to alert the potential reader about the type of poetry you will be encountering. For some, these certainly seem to hit home much more so than they did for me. There are certain books of poetry that I return to again and again but I don't think this will be one of them.

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

That window that he uses to create an "into" in the poems. I go into the landscape, because there is a window beside the oak tree covered with snow. I go into my brother because he has a window in his stomach. It's an outrageous depth charge that moves through the poems!