The Dream Songs

A handful of these poems are among my favourite poems ever but, as a whole, I find the collection uneven: many, the majority, just mean nothing to me. Even so, the dream song is a gorgeous format, and when they are good they are very very good. ( )

It rocked me to my bones when I first read it. ( )

Berryman declared he was not Henry, but we are most of us Henrys, all struggling to keep going through what the world throws at us and, worst of all, what we throw at ourselves. Mordantly funny, often self-pitying, with a jazz/jive edge, and an obscurity at times almost wilful - you really need to know a lot about Berryman's life to understand what's going on here at times - these are the poems I return to most often and with extreme pleasure. A unique and exceptional voice. ( )

I have lived with these poems for years, and survived.

The thing that, for me, separates Berryman from the other "confessional" poets is his sense of humor. It is a black humor, certainly, a skull coughing and chuckling while chain smoking cigarettes, but it is a sense of humor nonetheless. Dark, dark, dark and funny.

Also noteworthy is the poet's twisted but seldom-erring ear. The syntax of these poems is often tortured, fractured, bent, but it is always meant to be that way.

I votes in my hole. ( )

Berryman occupies a special place in my brain. He is quite simply one of the most startlingly original poets of the 20th century, and the fact that he isn't taught right up front in literature classes alongside T. S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath makes me terribly sad. ( )