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cryo_guy's review against another edition
4.0
"Unless my lungs adapt me to despair,
I'll nod off into the increasing, wide,
Marvelous sleep my hope lets herald me."
"I have heard nothing but the sough of the sea
And wide upon the open sea my friend
The sea-wind crying, out of its cave to roam
No more, no more . . until my memory
Swung you back like a lock: I sing the end,
Tolerant Aeolus to call me home."
So I hadn't heard of Berryman before I moved to Minnesota, and once finding out about him, I think a friend recommended the Dreamsongs, maybe I read one or two and thought it might be cool to read up on him, you know, modernist poets, why not? I found this book randomly at a used book store so I said to myself, "Well Anders, why not start here?" And so here we are, my first experience with a full Berryman text.
This book of poetry was exactly what it promised to be: a torrid love affair in the form of 115 sonnets. And: a combination of the traditional sonnet form with modernist American diction and sensibilities. I found the combination to be pleasant, at times too opaque or boring, at others quite virtuous and profound--warranting pondering. Berryman is also considered to be part of the "confessional writing" style of poetry which very clearly comes out in this work. Although, it seems sort of second-nature that a collection of poems written in the 1st person by one of the parties in a torrid love affair would be, in a word, confessional.
What's more? Well the style really is exquisite-I mean that it was done well, though sometimes I found it to be jarring or inscrutable. I'll say that Berryman knows his stuff, takes full advantage of rhythm, rhyme, meter, and copious amounts and degrees of ellipsis, allusion, diction, elision, and other poetic techniques to make the sonnets fit their proper form but also bring something new. It's pleasurable to read a poet like this, but sometimes it's also irritating. They know more than me and I have to look stuff up. He puts things too vaguely and I don't want to think so hard to figure out what he's saying. But at the pleasurable times, things do line up and the message is a fine beam of light, prepared to warm or sear, with passion or grief.
Corresponding to these two sides of the poetry I've identified, my reaction was also bifurcated. The enjoyable moments were either intensely unbearable for their passion or delivered a dour mind beyond repair. It's things we've all experienced, those of us who have been in love under not ideal circumstances. It's hard to confront those things, just like it's hard for most people to confront the feelings that they're too busy to deal with. I'm not saying this poetry will have some sort of psychotherapeutic effect on you, but it may be something relevant to your experiences. Recognizing that love exists in difficult circumstances isn't the most outlandish thing to affirm, regardless.
There's something else I want to say to on top of the joy and irritation I experienced: There's something about the idea of a man, or a character, writing 115 sonnets that express various levels of passion and heartache that transcends my joy and the irritation. This is a man who has spilled out the ordeal of his love fraught with pain and that in itself is an overpowering testament to his will. At the end of reading the book I found myself emotionally drained. Maybe I'm taking things to seriously, but to quote Rilke, "Sex is difficult, true. But difficult things are what we were set to do, almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious. If you only acknowledge this and manage from your own resources, from your own disposition and nature, from your own experience and childhood and strength, to win your way towards a relationship to sex that is wholly your own (not influenced by convention and custom), then you have no need to fear losing yourself and becoming unworthy of your best possession" (From #4, Worpswede near Bremen, 16 July 1903 trans. Charlie Louth). This is the great struggle we all conduct ourselves in and these poems are a testament to that.
So yes I enjoyed this. I would recommend it to those readers of modernist American poetry or those interested in the sonnet form. I will say though that most of the poems are quite dense so to the untrained eye they may be tiresome. But, at the same time, there are quite a few fine turns of phrase that may be pleasing in other ways without subterranean scrutiny.
Here's probably my favorite (57):
"Our love conducted as in heavy rain
Develops hair and lowers its head: the lash
And weight of rain breed, like the soundless slosh
Divers make round a wrack, régime, domain
Invisible, to us inured invisible stain
Of all our process; also lightning flash
Limns us audacious and furtive, whom slow crash
On crash jolt like the mud- and storm-blind Wain.
If the rain ceased and the unlikely sun
Shone out! . . whom our stars shake, could we emerge
Trustful and clear into the common rank,--
So long deceiving?--Days when Dathan sank
Quick to the pit not past, darling, we verge
Daily O there: have strange changes begun?"
I'll nod off into the increasing, wide,
Marvelous sleep my hope lets herald me."
"I have heard nothing but the sough of the sea
And wide upon the open sea my friend
The sea-wind crying, out of its cave to roam
No more, no more . . until my memory
Swung you back like a lock: I sing the end,
Tolerant Aeolus to call me home."
So I hadn't heard of Berryman before I moved to Minnesota, and once finding out about him, I think a friend recommended the Dreamsongs, maybe I read one or two and thought it might be cool to read up on him, you know, modernist poets, why not? I found this book randomly at a used book store so I said to myself, "Well Anders, why not start here?" And so here we are, my first experience with a full Berryman text.
This book of poetry was exactly what it promised to be: a torrid love affair in the form of 115 sonnets. And: a combination of the traditional sonnet form with modernist American diction and sensibilities. I found the combination to be pleasant, at times too opaque or boring, at others quite virtuous and profound--warranting pondering. Berryman is also considered to be part of the "confessional writing" style of poetry which very clearly comes out in this work. Although, it seems sort of second-nature that a collection of poems written in the 1st person by one of the parties in a torrid love affair would be, in a word, confessional.
What's more? Well the style really is exquisite-I mean that it was done well, though sometimes I found it to be jarring or inscrutable. I'll say that Berryman knows his stuff, takes full advantage of rhythm, rhyme, meter, and copious amounts and degrees of ellipsis, allusion, diction, elision, and other poetic techniques to make the sonnets fit their proper form but also bring something new. It's pleasurable to read a poet like this, but sometimes it's also irritating. They know more than me and I have to look stuff up. He puts things too vaguely and I don't want to think so hard to figure out what he's saying. But at the pleasurable times, things do line up and the message is a fine beam of light, prepared to warm or sear, with passion or grief.
Corresponding to these two sides of the poetry I've identified, my reaction was also bifurcated. The enjoyable moments were either intensely unbearable for their passion or delivered a dour mind beyond repair. It's things we've all experienced, those of us who have been in love under not ideal circumstances. It's hard to confront those things, just like it's hard for most people to confront the feelings that they're too busy to deal with. I'm not saying this poetry will have some sort of psychotherapeutic effect on you, but it may be something relevant to your experiences. Recognizing that love exists in difficult circumstances isn't the most outlandish thing to affirm, regardless.
There's something else I want to say to on top of the joy and irritation I experienced: There's something about the idea of a man, or a character, writing 115 sonnets that express various levels of passion and heartache that transcends my joy and the irritation. This is a man who has spilled out the ordeal of his love fraught with pain and that in itself is an overpowering testament to his will. At the end of reading the book I found myself emotionally drained. Maybe I'm taking things to seriously, but to quote Rilke, "Sex is difficult, true. But difficult things are what we were set to do, almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious. If you only acknowledge this and manage from your own resources, from your own disposition and nature, from your own experience and childhood and strength, to win your way towards a relationship to sex that is wholly your own (not influenced by convention and custom), then you have no need to fear losing yourself and becoming unworthy of your best possession" (From #4, Worpswede near Bremen, 16 July 1903 trans. Charlie Louth). This is the great struggle we all conduct ourselves in and these poems are a testament to that.
So yes I enjoyed this. I would recommend it to those readers of modernist American poetry or those interested in the sonnet form. I will say though that most of the poems are quite dense so to the untrained eye they may be tiresome. But, at the same time, there are quite a few fine turns of phrase that may be pleasing in other ways without subterranean scrutiny.
Here's probably my favorite (57):
"Our love conducted as in heavy rain
Develops hair and lowers its head: the lash
And weight of rain breed, like the soundless slosh
Divers make round a wrack, régime, domain
Invisible, to us inured invisible stain
Of all our process; also lightning flash
Limns us audacious and furtive, whom slow crash
On crash jolt like the mud- and storm-blind Wain.
If the rain ceased and the unlikely sun
Shone out! . . whom our stars shake, could we emerge
Trustful and clear into the common rank,--
So long deceiving?--Days when Dathan sank
Quick to the pit not past, darling, we verge
Daily O there: have strange changes begun?"
tmarwee's review against another edition
4.0
If Catullus was drunk and middle-aged writing about his affairs
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