JOHN GERY: 'White-Collar Gnosticism'
Notre Dame Review -> Issue # 16, Summer 2003
STEVE SPENCE: 'The Manager - a Poem', Jan 2003
Terrible Work -> Archive -> Burns
J. L. GORDON: 'Cracking the Jigsaw'
Amazon Review
NICHOLAS MOSLEY
I found The Manager intensely powerful and moving – like Dylan Thomas’s raging against the dying of the light. It is a savage paean of praise for life. The protagonist becomes a giant figure.
BARRY MACSWEENEY
The Manager is a fabulous work ... Its tense hysterical edges and jagged rhythms are just what we need ... More and more we need to record the breakdown, anger, frustration, paranoia and downright bloodiness of society. Richard has his hand on the thudding pulse.
GILES GORDON
I suspect, quite genuinely, that The Manager may be a masterpiece and posterity will regard it as such.
VAL HENNESSY
I found it absolutely riveting. It is a wrenched-from-the-heart work, packed with good things and zapping along in a very compelling manner.
FRANK KERMODE
The Manager is a strange and impressive work, energetic, painful ... and funny when it wants to be. There are many changes of mood and tone, it is well informed about so many things, it ought to be admired and widely discussed.
ANTHONY RUDOLF:
I believe Richard Burns will be one of the major poets writing in English in the early years of the new millennium. There is no other voice like his. Watch out for him.
ALAN SILLITOE
A wonderful and very special piece of work, something new, deep, and not beyond anybody’s comprehension.
ELAINE FEINSTEIN
For all its cleverness, and the freshness and elegance of the overall structure, it is the local intensity of feeling I admire. It is a remarkable work.
NASOS VAYENAS
A superb book, an epic of contemporary western life, mixing the personal and the public, the individual and the historic, into a daring and admirable poetic amalgam ... Everything is in its place: nothing is missing and nothing is unnecessary.
CAROL ANN DUFFY
Some poets soar above straightforward craftsmanship. [The] extracts from The Manager by Richard Burns give a genuine frisson with their stark originality.
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN
Many have tried, and many more will try, to crack the mystery of our condition, which is unlike any other we or our fathers or mothers have ever known before. Most have failed: our experience seems to escape any nets sewn of words which have been forced into stiff definitions. But images often say more and, unlike arguments, may be used as mirrors to hold up to the countenance of our experience. Richard Burns is master-supreme of images. His images speak, and they speak of truth that cannot be grasped in any other way.
MICHELINE WANDOR
It is a riveting, demanding read.
KIRSTEN THORUP
The Manager is a great poem. It has everything.
STEVE SPENCE
This may well turn out to be the book of the decade. Get hold of a copy and read it. Re-read it.
SIR PETER PARKER
The book strikes me as a remarkable leap, or leaps of imagination, and, oh, he has got guts.
JONATHAN TREITL
How do you write the Great European Poem? ... This is an extremely ambitious and interesting work – one that needs to be read and re-read.
GLYN PURSGLOVE
Whether in its vigorous images, its manic wordplay, its anger or its tenderness, The Manager is never less than gripping. It is a remarkable work, intense in its articulation of individual moments but also lucidly shaped in terms of its larger design.
ROBERT DAVREU
An extraordinary poem, in a new genre.
FRANCIS JONES
The hero’s ironic look at his life, work and couplings in the first half changes into a searing self-knowledge. In the second half, the plot-line starts gripping you by the throat. It’s a long time since I’ve read a book of poems, or a long poem, which I couldn’t put down: I had to stay up till I’d finished it. The poetry never falters; there’s a dazzling variety of styles and voices; and the narrative
line keeps you reading. The hero’s journey through the depths has an Odyssean / Bloomsday quality.
JEREMY HOOKER
I find The Manager brilliant, a work of sustained brilliance. It is everywhere exceptionally well written, with a linguistic versatility that is rare in any writing ]and sometimes calls to mind Joyce, not by suggesting a debt to him, but by virtue of its control of language, its knowledge of words.
The work has immense verbal richness, it delights in words, it knows them intimately, it knows their many diverse use for different purposes, and therefore has a considerable range of voices, a range far wider than The Waste Land ...
It is in the voices, above all – romantic, lyrical, sardonic, self-condemned by cliché, ‘managerial’, ‘popular’, ‘bitter’, tender – that The Manager at once composes and reveals, projects and diagnoses a whole modern world with its conditions of life ..
I do not know another poem, or indeed any writing, which is at once so expert in our modern consumerist specialist language, and so witty in exposing their superficiality and heartlessness.
MANAGEMENT TODAY
Here is a curious thing – a long poem by Richard Burns setting out in often bizarre and unexpected form a portrait of a manager at the end of his tether at the end of the century ... This is a challenging but rewarding read. It is impressive in scope, and the ease with which Burns switches from the arch formality of the office hierarchies to the chatter of the street is striking.