Burke’s poetry is unsentimental, stark in its concepts, imagery and language, yet it can also be lyrical and romantic. For the most part, his subject matter is the
Limerick where he grew up and where he continues to live,but his poetry escapes any narrow confines. The poems can be provocative, playful, dramatic, and uncertain. They move between the ordinary and the metaphysical, each
with a form to match. In reading these poems the associative process takes over to assemble a montage of an enigmatic self.
— Anton Floyd