77 Dream Songs

Джон Берримен

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».