FSG Celebrates John Berryman Centennial With Four New Books

The New York Times pays heed to the centennial of John Berryman's birth, for not to "would be to shuck a very large obligation indeed." For the occasion, Farrar, Straus and Giroux is celebrating Berryman in four new books: a new Berryman volume titled The Heart Is Strange: New Selected Poems; reissues of The Dream Songs, 77 Dream Songs, Berryman’s Sonnets; and a memoir, Poets in Their Youth (1982), "by Berryman’s first wife, the writer and psychologist Eileen Simpson." We like Dwight Garner's biographical note:

The details of his troubled life are hard to untangle from his verse. He was born in Oklahoma, where his father shot himself outside the boy’s window when Berryman was 12. He graduated from Columbia in 1939 and grew up to be a shambolic creature with large appetites and a self-destructive streak, marrying three times and writing in one of his semi-autobiographical dream songs,

Hunger was constitutional with him,

women, cigarettes, liquor, need need need

until he went to pieces.

The pieces sat up & wrote.

We know how it ended, though Garner gently mentions that too. As for the work:

“The Heart Is Strange” is a book with a large hole in it; it feels like a shucked obligation. The previous volume of Berryman’s selected poems, edited by Kevin Young and published by the Library of America in 2004, included savvy selections from both the dream songs and the sonnets.

The problem with releasing a selected volume of Berryman without the dream songs, especially, is that his work before them was often imitative (of Yeats, among others) and his work after them was often slack.

But the actual Dream Songs:

There’s no pleasure in warning readers away from a Berryman book. I’d be shucking my obligation not to, instead, make a renewed case for “The Dream Songs.” It’s a book that collects Berryman’s original 77 dream songs and adds the further 308 he later wrote. This new edition includes a fond, funny and brilliant introduction by the poet and translator Michael Hofmann.

Here is Berryman’s masterpiece, one of those books of American poetry that, like certain mountains, has its own weather. Berryman found his form in these songs. They are serious, ambitious and elastic arrangements he could put everything into, high culture and low, Shakespeare as well as the blues, strong religious feeling as well as low impulses of every variety.

The poems’ speaker is Henry, who is and isn’t Berryman. There’s not room left in this review to do much beyond quote “The Dream Songs” a bit, which it is a keen pleasure to do. Berryman’s admirers can instantly summon these lines, which are from different poems, as well as so many others. “He stared at ruin. Ruin stared straight back.”

Read it all at The New York Times.