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Title: The Dream Songs by John Berryman ISBN: 0-374-51670-7 Publisher: Noonday Press Pub. Date: 01 June, 1982 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.8 (10 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Berrymania
Comment: Dream Songs describe the manias of a very sick man who drank two fifths of J.W. Dant per day, and this book describes the addiction, at length. Barley-based liquor makes a man puffy & effeminate; he worries about it in this book. PS: Henry was Berryman's dentist. See Dentatus Vaginus legend in the Index of Folk Motif Literature for the connection with teeth; he mentions that in the book, too. Berryman consciously wrote of & for intellectual history, and it shows in this book. A man of letters, in a time that had waning interest in such, he describes his cross-motivation like a noble mind o'erthrown, in media autovivisectu.
Rating: 5
Summary: Curses John Berryman
Comment: Curse you John Berryman! You have ruined my ear for other poets. THE DREAM SONGS is one of those award-winning modern epics you wonder why you are reading until near the end, when you realize that you have slipped completely into the author's syntaxes, thoughts and, yes, dreams.
Don't let Berryman in his forward tell you different: this book is baldly autobiographical. Berryman dubbed himself Henry, gave a voice to his traumatized psyche (Mr. Bones) and set them talking, unraveling a lifetime of scholarship mixed with pain.
If you have read about Berryman, you will see him instantly in THE DREAM SONGS. Yet, unlike Robert Lowell, Berryman doesn't assume a familiarity with his biography that verges on solipsism. It is enough to know his father killed himself, Berryman killed himself, Berryman had affairs, was an alcoholic, was married several times and that he dearly loved literature, especially Shakespeare, some of whose Sonnets he parodies.
There is no narrative to the 385 Songs, per se. They come in thematic groups, which are grouped into seven 'books' and, like diary entries, chronicle whatever is on Henry's mind, which is often the untimely deaths other poets, such as Delmore Schwartz and Sylvia Plath. Like most "modern" poetry, THE DREAM SONGS is a tough slog through sentences that may or may not make sense. Except if you read them enough and carefully, they start making sense. It's a magical effect, but not gained without some serious struggle.
The poems themselves are incomparable to anything I've read before. Berryman borrows aspects of African-American English and WCWesque directness. He composes dehydrated, idiosyncratically-punctuated sentences that straddle stanzas of six lines, often rhymed and never predictable in length. Individual lines sometimes break into startling caesuras or hover outside the regular three-of-six form. However inconsisent individually, the poems achieve a perverse (foolish?) consistency overall which, grasped, is that magical concussion I spoke of before. THE DREAM SONGS are nothing if not unique; I highly-recommend them as part of a balanced poetic diet.
Rating: 5
Summary: one of the canonical books of his generation
Comment: John Berryman's unprecedented, idiosyncratic, jazzy use of language in poetry earned his a permanent place in the annals of 20th century poetry. & he's talked about all the time in modern poetry. If you want to know modern poetry, this is one of the most important books of 20th century poetry you must familiarize yourself with.
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Title: Collected Poems 1937-1971 by John Berryman, Charles Thornbury ISBN: 0374522812 Publisher: Noonday Press Pub. Date: July, 1991 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Life Studies and for the Union Dead by Robert Lowell ISBN: 0374506280 Publisher: Noonday Press Pub. Date: June, 1967 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop ISBN: 0374518173 Publisher: Noonday Press Pub. Date: 01 April, 1984 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Collected Poems: Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter; Introduction by Frank Bidart by Robert Lowell, Frank Bidart, David Gewanter ISBN: 0374126178 Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux Pub. Date: June, 2003 List Price(USD): $45.00 |
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Title: Selected Poems by Robert Lowell ISBN: 0374514003 Publisher: Noonday Press Pub. Date: October, 1977 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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