The heart is strange (First edition)

John Berryman was perhaps the most idiosyncratic American poet of the twentieth century.

Known for the painfully sad and raucously funny cycle of 'Dream Songs', he wrote passionately of love and despair, of grief and laughter, of longing for a better world and coming to terms with this one.

This title includes a generous selection from across Berryman's varied career: from his earliest poems, which show him learning the craft, to his breakthrough masterpiece, 'Homage to Mistress Bradstreet'; then to his mature verses, which find the poet looking back upon his lovers and youthful passions; and finally to his late poems, in which he battles with sobriety and an increasingly religious sensibility.