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77 Dream Songs
Contributor(s): Berryman, John (Author), Swift, Daniel (Editor), Cole, Henri (Introduction by)
ISBN: 0374534527     ISBN-13: 9780374534523
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
OUR PRICE:   $14.40  
Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats
Published: October 2014
Qty:
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Poetry | American - General
- Poetry | Canadian
Dewey: 811.54
Series: FSG Classics
Physical Information: 0.5" H x 5.4" W x 8.1" (0.25 lbs) 112 pages
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:

A wild, masterful Pulitzer Prize-winning cycle of poems that half a century later still shocks and astounds
John Berryman was hardly unknown when he published 77 Dream Songs, but the volume was, nevertheless, a shock and a revelation. A spooky collection in the words of Robert Lowell-a maddening work of genius.
As Henri Cole notes in his elegant, perceptive introduction, Berryman had discovered a looser style that mixed high and low dictions with a strange syntax. Berryman had also discovered his most enduring alter ego, a paranoid, passionate, depressed, drunk, irrepressible antihero named Henry or, sometimes, Mr. Bones: We touch at certain points, Berryman claimed, of Henry, But I am an actual human being.
Henry may not be real, but he comes alive on the page. And while the most famous of the Dream Songs begins, Life, friends, is boring, these poems never are. Henry lusts: seeing a woman Filling her compact & delicious body / with chicken p prika he can barely restrain himself: only the fact of her husband & four other people / kept me from springing on her. Henry despairs: All the world like a woolen lover / once did seem on Henry's side. / Then came a departure. Henry, afraid of his own violent urges, consoles himself: Nobody is ever missing.
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.


Contributor Bio(s): Berryman, John: - John Berryman (1914-1972) was an American poet and scholar. He won the Pulitzer Prize for 77 Dream Songs in 1965 and the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize for His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, a continuation of the Dream Songs, in 1969.Swift, Daniel: - Daniel Swift teaches at the New College of the Humanities in London. His first book, Bomber County, was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Guardian First Book award, and his essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the New Statesman, and Harper's.Cole, Henri: - Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan, in 1956. He has published eight previous collections of poetry and received many awards for his work, including the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. His most recent collection is Touch. He lives in Boston, where he is a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.