77 dream songs (Paperback edition.)

A wild, masterful Pulitzer Prize-winning cycle of poems that half a century later still shocks and astoundsJohn Berryman was hardly unknown when he published 77 Dream Songs, but the volume was, nevertheless, a shock and a revelation.

A "e;spooky"e; collection in the words of Robert Lowell-"e;a maddening work of genius."e; As Henri Cole notes in his elegant, perceptive introduction, Berryman had discovered "e;a looser style that mixed high and low dictions with a strange syntax."e; Berryman had also discovered his most enduring alter ego, a paranoid, passionate, depressed, drunk, irrepressible antihero named Henry or, sometimes, Mr. Bones: "e;We touch at certain points,"e; Berryman claimed, of Henry, "e;But I am an actual human being."e; Henry may not be real, but he comes alive on the page. And while the most famous of the Dream Songs begins, "e;Life, friends, is boring,"e; these poems never are.

Henry lusts: seeing a woman "e;Filling her compact & delicious body / with chicken paprika"e; he can barely restrain himself: "e;only the fact of her husband & four other people / kept me from springing on her."e; Henry despairs: "e;All the world like a woolen lover / once did seem on Henry's side. / Then came a departure."e; Henry, afraid of his own violent urges, consoles himself: "e;Nobody is ever missing."e; 77 Dream Songs won the Pulitzer Prize in 1965, but Berryman's formal and emotional innovations-he cracks the language open, creates a new idiom in which to express eternal feelings-remain as alive and immediate today as ever.