The Burnt Island of D. Nurkse's eighth collection is not the Burnt Norton of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets. Some such comparison seems inevitable, though, not least because Nurkse's island shows up as an eponymous poem at the center of a book that he divides into three “suites,” thereby more than suggesting an echo of Eliot's famed four- part musical opus, and also that this linked group of poems may be meant, in Ezra Pound's useful summons, to “make it new.”

But is it new, and if it is, what is it renewing? A number of contrasts between these two linchpin poems, and between both of the longer works in which they appear, seem self- evident as well as intriguing. If Eliot's “Burnt Norton” takes us “Into our first world” and moves through “The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery” whose “leaves [are] full of children/ Hidden excitedly, containing laughter,” Nurkse's “Burnt Island”— with its title that refers to an island off the coast of Maine, whether “burnt” or not— presents us with “two villages, Baker and Chester; two industries,/ lobster and watercolor; two churches,/ Baptist and Universalist,” and a single child who

In Eliot and Nurkse's primal visions, an early- feeling garden rises into spiritual possibilities and then slips free of them, with just a hint in Nurkse's “Burnt Island” of Eliot's quietly menacing territory in which “human kind/ Cannot bear very much reality.”

Despite these similarities and discrepancies, a measure of “Burnt Norton’s” cruel and unbearable reality, but transposed and transformed, appears in Nurske's other poems. It develops as a ghostly negative even as his new poems keep returning us to the book's heart, its “Burnt Island,” or lead us away from it— or to cite Eliot once more, as they “Point to one end, which is always present.” Like Eliot's Four Quartets, Nurkse's book seems to be centered on that old, tantalizing puzzle whether secure meanings can be found or said to exist.