Collected Poems, 1937-1971 [Hardcover]

John Berryman (Author), Charles Thornbury (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 19, 1989

This volume brings together all of Berryman’s poetry, except for his epic The Dream Songs, ranging from his earliest unpublished poem (1934) to those written in the last months of his life (1972). A definitive edition of one of America’s most distinguishe

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

For readers unattuned to what Thornbury here calls "Berryman's strange and dissonant music," this gathering of verse may unlock the poems' inner recesses. In his extensive introductory essay, the editor, who teaches at St. John's University in Minnesota, explores Berryman's poetry of disrupted syntax, of continual deaths and rebirths, of self-deceptions and ultimate self-understanding. He also provides a biographical context for the sonnets, satires and confessionals, taking into account the poet's peripatetic boyhood, his suppressed rage at his father's suicide, his metamorphoses as Cambridge don, alcoholic philanderer, itinerant professor-poet and suicide at age 57. Berry displayed his febrile inventiveness as early as Sonnets to Chris (1947), a cycle included here that is by turns romantically tender, cynical, manic, elegant and slangy; this edition brings together all of Berryman's published volumes of poetry except for The Dream Songs.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Making careful editorial decisions about Berryman's sometimes confusing manuscripts and corrected page proofs, Thornbury brings together all seven collections of short poems and Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. Though one can trace the influences of other poets--Yeats, Auden, Crane--before Berryman's voice emerges, ultimately the subject of his poems is unabashedly the personal. Tortured if brilliant, Berryman draws on his many selves to fashion dialogs between old and new ways of being. Central to the mid-century's intellectual and emotional life, he records the outcome of human experience as the opposite of what we either hope for or expect in shifts of language from dialect to sophisticated rhetoric that underscore the poetry's agony. Not included are Berryman's own published prefaces and notes, copy texts, variants, The Dream Songs , and posthumously published works.
- Rosaly DeMaios Roffman, Indiana Univ. of Pennsylvania
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 366 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (September 19, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374126194
• ISBN-13: 978-0374126193
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #992,709 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Definitive Berryman, August 17, 2008

By 

Dennis M. Hammes "scrawlmark" (Moorhead, MN) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: John Berryman: Collected Poems 1937-1971 (Paperback)

All the poems but the /Dream Songs/, which are collected separately (also from Amazon). The included /Sonnets/ are from the original ms carbons, unemended, but with the five extra of the 1964 first edition.

Easy typeface and size, stanzas properly divided.

Adequate bio for all but Berryman scholars.

You like Berryman in whole or part, or you don't, and this is where you'll find out. If you do, a must-have (also the /Dream Songs/).

1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars John Berryman, Collected Poems, February 3, 2011

By 

Lawrence J. Lujan (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: John Berryman: Collected Poems 1937-1971 (Paperback)

I ordered this book as a birthday present to myself. It came quickly, and it's fine--I'm about halfway through reading it now.