Actual Air

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However, overall, I’d recommend it for its strengths, and it does seem to fit certain kinds of moods and inspirations. Yet the two are eternally wedded together in the way they both scratch those terrible existential itches of life, and the way both maintain a youthful fondness for existence that hasn’t lessened with age.

In his review for Spin, Joshua Clover praised the book, writing, "his instrument is his own; very few of the poems fail to find a finger of mystery, a ring of familiarity. I wonder if I passed him on the street, one of my heroes, and didn't recognize him because I didn't think to look for him. self-portrait at 28" is a work of particular brilliance; each time i read it i am piqued and comforted, loving it anew.The ones that are neither here nor there are flooded by the stop/start fuckbrilliance of the others. Berman's songs were always a dear companion during the hardest parts of my life and I can't thank him enough for that, but we also can't glorify the notion of a tortured artist.

Instead of a long and ultimately not satisfactory review, I'll simply quote just a few of my favorite lines from this collection (if the pages with dog ears give me any idea of how many quotes I wanted to remember, it looks like I enjoyed one from at least each page). His poems chart a course through his own highly original American dreamscape in language that is fresh, accessible, and remarkably precise. Sometimes Berman so singularly wrangles English into uncanny, dream-logic revelation it gives me goddamn chills.

i love david berman’s songwriting, but he’s able to link disparate images more effectively with an instrumental backing. It's whatever the opposite of Kafkaesque would be: instead of dwelling on the horrors of bureaucracy and its totalitarian overgrowth, Berman describes the evils of American society with beautiful imagery. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

Over and over again his music and poetry made meaning for me and comforted me and made me laugh and made me sad and made me look at the objects and people and situations of this world in a new light. Giving a rating for this--or nearly any--collection of poetry would be easier if you could rate individual poems. Hearing that David Berman is gone really stung today, not just because the way his poetry, music and lyrics have had a large impact on me throughout my life--particularly in hard times, but mostly because he was such a bright light while enduring his own personal struggles that eventually became too much for him. It's very cute and funny and nicely observed, with images/observations like, "Then we were on the roof of the lake.The longer poems don’t tend to hold together (the centerpiece of the collection, “Michener’s Cantos [selections],” seems to focus around the concept of the “Polish joke”, and is probably in most of its sections a bit thin to justify its length). But “jive” is a thoroughly modern term that by the time he’s set us up, we’re completely stricken by, only to ultimately be placed in the shoes of the guest who yawns and studies a glass. He has a firm control of much of his material; a good sense of balance between narrative passages and more free-association types of passages; and a sense of what will be evocative, what will seem like some sort of subtle twist. Another favorite poem of mine from the collection, titled “From Guide to the Graves of British Actors”, mixes preconceived notions about the Brits that Berman attributes, presumably, to those “state-side” with some semi-authentic sounding “slang” to come up with something quite amusing, the “emergency” at the end of the poem presumably referring back to the mundane “long life lived in that pause where a guest studies his ice cubes”: “If you have … built plot and theme/and finally setting sun/onto the flat earth of chessboards,/then to die on contemporary furniture/with John Webster’s antique jive on your lips,/after a long life lived in that pause/where a guest studies his ice cubes/and listens to the room tick,/would rinse the larger stillness with whole moments lost in yawns”. The Virginia-born poet and the lead singer of the Silver Jews expresses his observations of pop-culture, Southern history, souvenirs, community colleges, back pain, hallways, and the weirdness of daily life.