Richard Berengarten

Richard Berengarten Poems

Richard Berengarten Biography

Richard Burns (nom de plume of Richard Berengarten) was born in London in 1943 of Jewish immigrant parents. He was educated at Mill Hill School, Pembroke College, Cambridge and University College London. He has lived in Greece, Italy, the UK, the US and former Yugoslavia. His first book of poetry, The Easter Rising, was published in 1967. While lecturing at Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology (now Anglia Ruskin University) in 1975 he launched and co-ordinated the Cambridge Poetry Festival, presenting international poets like John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Ted Hughes, Michael Hamburger and numerous others. His poems and poetry books have been translated into more than twenty languages (the poem Volta, presented in issue 9/2009 of The International Literary Quarterly (London) - Richard Burns, Volta: A Multilingual Anthology - into 75. Crna Svetlost (Black Light) was published in Yugoslavia in 1984, Arbol (Tree) in Spain in 1986, and bilingual editions of Tree/Baum (1989) and Black Light/Schwarzes Licht (1996), both translated by Theo Breuer, were published in Germany. His perspectives as a poet combine British, French, Mediterranean, Jewish, Slavic, American and Oriental influences. On his own work Richard Berengarten says: "I would rather think of myself as a European poet who writes in English than as an 'English' poet." Berengarten is a popular reader of his own poetry, and a dynamic teacher. Richard Berengarten lives in Cambridge.)

The Best Poem Of Richard Berengarten

A Gift

You, other, fellow, person, human, neighbour,
whose kin cannot be proved, who yet are kin,
though strange, and stranger far for being within,
you, sharer and divider of this labour
I toil at here - what for? who for? for you?
Or for my vanity? or therapy? or pride? -
What will you make of this once I have died
and you glance at or through, yet can't gaze through?
Our only rendezvous, sole meeting place
is here, among, in, through, beneath, behind
these plural words, and in their virtual space,
for here we greet and touch, as kin, as kind.
So, singular, far friend, although your face
is stranger, here we meet in heart and mind

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