Word: berrymans
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HENRY'S FATE by JOHN BERRYMAN...
Posthumous selections of unpublished poetry should be viewed suspiciously. The dead poet may have had good aesthetic reasons for keeping some of his work to himself. Fortunately, Henry's Fate does not malign the memory of John Berryman, who five years ago committed suicide at age 57. Critic John Haffenden has gathered 45 "Dream Songs" written after 77 Dream Songs (1964) and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968)-the two books that certified Berryman as a major American writer. Henry, the fast-talking middle-aged hero of the dream songs, continued to suffer and thrive in Berryman...
...alter ego travels to Venice. Henry worries over "his failing life, / his whiskey curse, his problems with his wife." He watches his young daughter grow older and thinks: "This is the end of Daddy, the shallowing of the depths of her childhood, when bearded Daddy was any." Though Berryman could movingly record Henry's despair at the deaths of friends, the poet could also tease his own creation...
Sometimes it seems a little like this Berryman poem I like, about the screen images of rats in childhood prison movies--where "the rats have grown up, mostly, and this is for real"--but usually it all seems civilized and ceremonious and pleasant. One of the articles that helped turn me fully against the war, I realized this year, was about how the Vietnamese were our time's Meursaults: like the people Camus tried to described, they had a faceless, irrational and overpowering enemy, and though they were not classical heroes they attained nobility by fighting oppression. Every day, hundreds...
...mailing messages to Post Office Box 8995 in Boston," the Adams House secretary says. "I see him from time to time. Yes, I've seen him once this year. He's been around for several years, you know. No one quite knows where he lives," says senior tutor Hugh Berryman...