Christopher Bursk's work has never risen as far into the American Poetic Pleiade as it should have done. His is a carefully notated, delicately observed work whose understatement belies its power. It is almost as if there is a poetic skin too few for Bursk with the world not mediated by the poem but the world becoming the poem. This suggests that Bursk's work is serious or uncomfortable; it can be both of those things. And deeply political. But humour is never very far from the surface of the poems often at Bursk's own expense as he looks at his own attitudes and perceptions with a wry irony. Christopher Bursk's best work is tender, reaching out to its subjects with extraordinary delicacy and warmth.