Richard Burns

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Richard Burns Biography

Richard Burns (born Richard Berengarten, 1943) is a European poet and editor. 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 Burns

I Dreamed I Slept

From a note by Ivo Andrić

I dreamed I slept, and in that sleep I dreamed,
and from that double dream interior woke
and walked in a closed courtyard. Someone spoke
behind me, and I turned. A dark girl beamed
brown eyes at me. I gazed. 'Just as you seemed
in dream to dream, so by the double stroke
of waking into waking, from this yoke
you've shouldered, may you be redeemed.'

So when I enter my last mortal sleep,
after all dreams have gone, and I am dead,
will then I wake and, doubly waking, keep
some mirror of that garden in my head
and, back inside it, rising from the deep
distress of death, sleepwalk, or wake instead?

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