Customer Reviews

Hymns of St. Bridget & Other Writings

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Alternately dashing & coy, these rapturous hymns ride a virgin-mary-go-round of respect & adulation for the skewed, tilted & impossible to love. With their conversational odes to the crooked spires of literary conspirators & the neighborhoods they rise from, Berkson & O'Hara erect an irresistible testament to friendship & the cracked open world of charming collaboration. The precarious steeple of St. Bridget's church in New York City might be gone, but what this pair of poet raconteurs have done will keep its pointed spirit forever lodged in anyone who eavesdrops on this reflectively genuflecting collection.

What other pair from the New York School would dare write poems about a crooked steeple? These poems (The Hymns) are sublime, silly, and brilliant, and are the perfect appetizer to the Other Writings, especially the fictional correspondace between Angelicus and Fidelio Fobb which had me rolling for hours. Even the "Unfinished Novel" was interestingly baffling albeit fleeting. All and all an incredibly savory mix of collaborations by two of the best poets in America!

What a pleasure it is to read the friendship between the lines of two such aesthetically rich poets as it was preserved onto paper 30 years ago. At first I read this book trying to figure out who wrote what. Oh, that sounds like a Berkson line, or that sounds like O'hara. But the pieces in this book really do, for the most part, lend themselves to being read as if written by a singular author; true of the best of collaborations. The work thus feels whole, controlled, and, simulataneously, spontaneous and wild. Lots of gratitude to Owl Press for saving this miraculous work from dust bin of history.