Serenade - Softcover

Berkson, Bill

4.35

17 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1581950160 ISBN 13: 9781581950168

Publisher: Zoland Books, 2000

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Book by Berkson, Bill

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Review:

11:59
151/2/34
After 99 Comes 100
After You
Algebra
Annus Mirabilis
Anti-poem
At The Skin
An Atlantic Door
Baby's Awake Now
Basis
Broom Genealogy
Bubbles
Burckhardt's Ninth
Chaloff
Chasing The Slip
Chocolate Chocolate Chip
Cnidus, August 4th
Dark Middle
Domino
Don't Knock It
Dream With Fred Astaire
Drill
Duchamp Dream
Empire Edge: 1. Window Seat
Empire Edge: 2. Getty Gas
End-of-century Thrush
'entraining To Southampton'
Familiar Music
First Turns
A Fixture
Fourth Street, San Rafael
From A Childhood #101
From Whence It Came
'the Hoole Book'
If I Pray To Anyone It Is To You
Instinct
Lorelei
Missing
Missing (2)
Moon People
Mother's Mother
Night Straits
No Claim To The Puzzle
Ocean And Grove
Ode: 1.
Ode: 2.
Old Buttermilk Sky
On Ice
On The High Window
Poem
Poem
Poem
The Position
Power Goes Off
Provincetown Light
Red Devil
Selected Dreams
Serenade
Serious Moment
Slow Curve, Hampton Road
Source
Space Dream
Stamina
Star Motel
Start Over: 1.
Start Over: 2.
Start Over: 3.
Start Over: 4.
Start Over: 5.
Start Over: 6.
Start Over: 7.
Start Over: 8.
Start Over: 9.
Stopping Is Nothing
Tint Guard
To Lynn
To Marie Cosindas
Try Again
Two Days: 1.
Two Days: 2.
Under A Cloud And After The Waves
Voyage From Jericho
You Know What Crazy Is?
You Sure Do Some Nice Things
Young Manhattan
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder�

From Publishers Weekly:

This ample, handsome and invaluable collection catches Berkson at his rhythmically impeccable best, a serene master of the syntactical sleight, transforming the mundane into the marvelous. In dreams indistinguishable from learned discourses, domestic scenes charted with patient hilarity and memory pieces rendered with uncanny precision and fast-paced immediacy (like an Astaire dance sequence), Berkson's artifice is glimpsed through the astonishing absence of mistakes. Whether condensed to a few lines, as in "Familiar Music," "Star Motel" or "Stamina," or unleashed at 25-page stretches, as in the brilliant "Start Over" (as worthy a companion to O'Hara's "Second Avenue" and Schuyler's "Hymn to Life" as the past quarter-century has produced), the poems gathered here have a windfallen pattern that lasts only as long as it must, then scatters again into the mess of sensation from which it issued: "Today they went away to stay/ Furnishings deranged like looks in instant photographs/ One frame we squabble, next we sweetly mend/ Cooling heels entwined on a daybed,/ Seemingly refreshed" ("You Sure Do Some Nice Things"). In light of their original composition dates, these works will no doubt be read as further evidence of the aesthetic cross-fertilization between "late" New York School writing and the Language-centered avant-garde of the '70s and '80s. Beyond such documentary value, the volume retains a jubilant contemporaneity and a dazzling verbal wit : within its pages, "anyone can anything anytime." The late artist and author Joe Brainard contributes five previously unpublished drawings. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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