This is real poetry. The whole book is an extremely impressive achievement.
NIGEL MCLOUGHLIN, in Poetry Review (Spring 2007, pp. 116-7)
The Blue Butterfly is a magnificent book. It uses seven tightly-worked subsections to examine a massacre at Sumarice in 1941. The volume is suffused with hope and bravery; and examines ethnic cleanbsing and mass hatred in a way that is particularly relevant in the current political climate.
A. A. T. DAVIES
The sequences are beautiful and intensely moving.
AUDE GOTTO
A beautiful, profound and important book. It needs to be read by many.
JAMES GORDON, Amazon review
GEORGE SZIRTES
One of the chief functions of poetry is commemoration: the poet tries to make a shape in language to perpetuate the passing moment of which the poet, the poet’s family and nation, and ever further, echoing ever more distantly, the whole human race is a part. But the human race does terrible things and suffers terrible things. Any murder is a crime. A massacre is a particularly heinous crime, and the event recalled here, a massacre of children is beyond words.
Or would be. Richard Burns has written an entire book of poems on the massacre at Kragujevac in October 1941. In various forms (sonnets, villanelles, terza rima and many others) and in various sections ranging from song and lament for the specific event, through the registering of the experiences of survivors, to metaphysical and philosophical questionings and short elegies, he gives shape to a moment apparently far in time and space. The figure of the small blue butterfly (a perfectly real butterfly as the photograph shows) is the impulse, the movement of whose wings starts a storm across half a world.
Epic poems are rare. This is one. Richard Burns is one of the major half-hidden poets of England. The book is a monument: vivid, grave, sorrowful, angry and powerfully constructed, a human act of commemoration.
ROBERT MACFARLANE:
I admire this book deeply. Delicately and rightly, it balances grief, joy, guilt, wonder and blessing. The ‘lacing’ of the poems into their contexts by the use of archival material, documents and photographs, works to mesh the poems back into history, but also to mesh history back into the present. It is a book which burns with "quiet fire".
CHRIS HAMILTON-EMERY (publisher of the book):
Because it examines profound and important issues, because it does not flinch from asking large questions, because it shapes a crafted, vital, living poetry out of suffering and tragedy, and because it insists on hope and pleads for joy, this is a book which has moral implications on many levels. Both passionate and thoughtful, demanding and rewarding, it is European in context and universal in scope and relevance.
ADAM DARIUS
You have given reverberating echo to the long voiceless.
ANDREW FRISARDI, 'Black Suns on the Scales', Contemporary Poetry Review
Burns is one of the more accomplished English poets currently writing, equally adept at traditional metrical forms, such as sonnets, villanelles, and blank verse, as he is at the free verse lyric or the speech rhythms used so effectively in The Manager. One of his virtues, as for any strong poet, is his ability to adapt the form to the poem and the subject matter at hand—and in Burns’s case the subject is usually serious and far-reaching . . .
Burns writes in the tradition that stakes a claim for imagination’s metaphysical efficacy . . .
That an actual blue butterfly landed on the author’s actual hand does not in the least preclude its being a symbol as well. This is the meaning of synchronicity, which Jung said is “the acausal connecting principle” behind meaningful coincidences. As elsewhere in Burns, this way of thinking is consistent with the hermetic or orphic worldview, which does not explain relations between events in terms of cause and effect but rather in terms of analogy. Synchronicity is the theory of correspondences in practice.