E-Book Overview
Faber are pleased to announce the relaunch of the poetry list - starting in Spring 2001 and continuing, with publication dates each month, for the rest of the year. This will involve a new jacket design recalling the typographic virtues of the classic Faber poetry covers, connecting the backlist and the new titles within a single embracing cover solution. A major reissue program is scheduled, to include classic individual collections from each decade, some of which have long been unavailable: Wallace Stevens's Harmonium and Ezra Pound's Personae from the 1920s; W.H. Auden's Poems (1930); Robert Lowell's Life Studies from the 1950s; John Berryman's 77 Dream Songs and Philip Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings from the 1960s; Ted Hughes's Gaudete and Seamus Heaney's Field Work from the 1970s; Michael Hofmann's Acrimony and Douglas Dunn's Elegies from the 1980s. Timed to celebrate publication of Seamus Heaney's new collection, Electric Light, the relaunch is intended to re-emphasize the predominance of Faber Poetry, and to celebrate a series which has played a shaping role in the history of modern poetry since its inception in the 1920s.
E-Book Content
JOHNBERR YMAN77DR EAMSONGS
JOHNBERR YMAN77DR EAMSONGS
Copyright © 1959, 1962, 1963, 1964, 2010 by John Berryman Library of Congress catalog card number 64-14107 Manufactured in the U.S.A. by American Book-Stratford Press, Inc. Re/Designed by Τάφος Δεμέστιχας
Contents
I 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26
Huffy Henry / 5 Big Buttons, Cornets: the advance / 6 A Stimulant for an Old Beast / 7 Filling her compact & delicious body / 8 Henry sats / 9 A Capital at Wells / 10 ‘The Prisoner of Shark Island’ with Paul Muni / 11 The weather was fine. / 12 Deprived of his enemy / 13 There were strange gatherings / 14 His mother goes. / 15 Sabbath / 16 God bless Henry. / 17 Life, friends / 18 Let us suppose / 19 Henry’s pelt / 20 Muttered Henry / 21 A Strut for Roethke / 22 Here, whence / 23 The Secret of the Wisdom / 24 Some good people / 25 Of 1826 / 26 The Lay of Ike / 27 Oh servant Henry / 28 Henry, edged / 29 The glories of the world / 30
II 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51
The greens of the Ganges delta / 33 Snow line / 34 There sat down, once / 35 Collating bones / 36 Henry Hankovitch / 37 And where, friend Quo / 38 An apple arc’d / 39 My mother has your shotgun. / 40 MLA / 41 The high ones die / 42 Three around the Old Gentleman His Malice / 43 The Russian grin / 44 Goodbye, sir / 45 I’m scared a lonely / 46 If we sang in the wood / 47 O journeyer / 48 ‘Oyez, oyez!’ / 49 Tell it to the forest fire / 50 He stared at ruin / 51 I am, outside. / 52 April Fool’s Day or St Mary of Egypt / 53 He yelled at me in Greek / 54 Blind / 55 In a motion of night / 56 Our wounds to time / 57
III 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77
Silent song / 60 He lay in the middle of the world / 61 ‘NO VISITORS’ / 62 Peter’s not friendly. / 63 Hell is empty. / 64 In a state of chortle sin. / 65 Industrious, affable / 66 Henry’s Meditation in the Kremlin / 67 After eight years / 68 Full moon. / 69 That dark-brown rabbit / 70 Bats have no bankers / 71 Supreme my holdings / 72 A freaking ankle / 73 ‘All virtues / 74 I don’t operate often. / 75 I heard, could be / 76 Love her he doesn’t / 77 Disangaged, bloody / 78 Spellbound / 79 The Elder Presences / 80 Karesansui, Ryoan-ji / 81 Henry hates the world / 82 Turning it over / 83 Henry’s Confession / 84 Seedy Henry / 85
I
1 Huffy Henry hid the day, unappeasable Henry sulked. I see his point,—a trying to put things over. It was the thought that they thought they could do it made Henry wicked & away. But he should have come out and talked. All the world like a woolen love