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Berryman's new collection (Songs 78 to 385) completes the work started in 77 Dream Songs. As in the first volume, Henry figures as the central character; occasionally a friend, who is never named, addresses him as "Mr. Bones." The songs' idiom is always peculiarly American, peculiarly Berryman. It is a successful combination of colloquial dialects and a modern, jazzy, discordant line that continually startles.
As Henry fights his intensely personal wars, struggles with love, drinks away his loneliness and imagines killing his father, who was really a suicide, Berryman fashions an epic view of life, often more dream than real. The tone is usually mournfully ironic, as in Song 142, describing one of Henry's amorous situations:
The animal moment, when he sorted out her tail
in a rump session with the vivid hostess
whose guests had finally gone,
was stronger, though so limited, though failed
all normal impulse before her interdiction, yes,
and Henry gave in.
I'd like to have your baby, but, she moaned,
I'm married. Henry muttered to himself
So am I and was glad
to keep chaste. If this lady he had had
scarcely could he have have ever forgiven himself
and how would he have atoned?
—Mr. Bones, you strong on moral these
days, hey?
It's good to be faithful but it ain't
natural, as you knows. —/ knew what I knew when I knew
when I was astray, all those bright painful years, forgiving
all but when Henry & his wives came
to blows.
This poetic cycle is a major achievement by one of the most important poets writing today, one who has chosen to challenge society by means of an engaging, corruptible, contemporary character, that compassionately discerned yet always dispassionately dissected middle-class white/black American, Henry/Mr. Bones.
WHITE-HAIRED LOVER by Karl Shapiro. 37 pages. Random House. $4.
Karl Shapiro's second volume of verse, V-Letter and Other Poems, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1945, and established him as a poet who could deal ably with the emotions of war. His Selected Poems won him a half share, with Berryman, of the 1969 Bollingen Prize. But his latest book of verse demonstrates that the toughness is gone and the vision is blurred when it comes to love. In this cycle of 29 love poems, adolescent maundering most often conquers whatever maturity of poetic line or concept should be expected.
How do I love? I don't even know
Now we're cut off again like a bad phone
(Faulty communications are my middle name).
What is most surprising is that he should publicly confess it.
THE PILL VERSUS THE SPRINGHILL MINE by Richard Brautigan. 108 Seasons Foundation. $1.95.
In this book of selected poems (1957-1968), Brautigan is Harlequin on a tightwire, poised between Earth and Heaven, simultaneously mocking the passions of the populace below and his own frail fumblings toward the stars. Though his vision sometimes expresses only itself, it often fully exposes man's foibles and feelings. His poems are, by turns, brutally realistic or surrealistically witty. Brautigan, a West Coast poet, needs but three lines to puncture "Man":
With his hat on