It is playful yet heartfelt at all times and embodies a modern generation by etching a detailed portrait out of prose alone. The poetry has “music”; when read aloud, one gets more from it than when one reads it on the page in many spots. Publishers Weekly praised the book, comparing parts of it to the poetry of John Ashbery and Thomas Lux and writing, "Berman's debut [announces] the discovery of great American poetic storytelling by a new generation.

So, if you’re a pragmatic reader and not a poet, you’re probably going to ask: OK, but what is all this stuff about?His band, the Silver Jews, has released four albums, The Natural Bridge, Starlite Walker, American Water, and Bright Flight, on Drag City Records ( www.

Do yourself a massive favor and introduce yourself to them, they always give a kind, firm handshake and smile to your soul. 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. But he doesn’t stay there, but rather goes into one of the more effective associative set of lines in the work: “and the North American doubling cascade/that (keep going) “this diamond lake is a photo lab”/and if predicates really do propel the plot/then you might see Jerusalem in a soap bubble/or the appliance failure on Olive Street/across these great instances,/because “the complex Italian versus the basic Italians/because what does a mirror look like (when it’s not working)…” Several phrases arrest one as being evocative, yet potentially without personal meaning in and of themselves. 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. I saw Silver Jews play back in 2005, a lifetime ago, and I feel fortunate to have seen Berman perform his music at least once, music which has been some of my very favorite since I was a teenager, music and lyrics that really meant the world to me, and created a very specific world for me and many people I know.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”. First, the title itself evokes the concept of what “Cassette country” would be… it made me think of things like mix tapes, old radios, and the row of cassettes one would have on their own cassette shelf. Actual Air by David Berman is a refreshing glass of reality, a chance to see the world like ‘ seeing rain / in it’s original uncut form. Or talking about signing his name on the lower corner of a window so the world becomes his art through his perception of it.

In the ideal world, or the world as written by a first-time novelist romanticizing their coming-of-age as if it meant anything to anyone other than them, I would have bought this at 16 and at 21 bought James Tate because of the blurb from him on the back, then cried at 29 when Tate passed. In closing he wrote that ' He’d gone down into the well of infinite sadness, beyond the reach of story, and he didn’t make it out it. These poems are like Berman's songs in most ways: some are killers, some are sleepers, some are neither here nor there. What Berman always pulled off exceptionally well is to place the dark lyrics into an upbeat song (listen to the first few tracks of Purple Mountains for a perfect example) and so often we find those who manage to appear upbeat are also hurting inside.His poems chart a course through his own highly original American dreamscape in language that is fresh, accessible, and remarkably precise. Some of what works about "Snow" --Berman's playfulness and seeming endless supply of fresh, spot-on images/metaphors, --thankfully show up throughout the collection, keeping the reader amused, awakened, and impressed. Other effective elements of "Snow"-- its clear sense of unity and direction-- seem lacking in many of the other poems, often leaving me floundering and annoyed. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. De enige dichtbundel van de geweldige David Berman, frontman van The Silver Jews en Purple Mountains (als je het nu hoort donderen ergens in de buurt van Keulen, luister naar zijn muziek, echt wereldtop).

David Berman's poems obviously share a lot of resemblance to his lyrics—and a few of them even feel like they were written as songs—but his poems speak to me in a way that even my favorite Silver Jews songs do not. Webster was known for being sort of the “lunatic” of the playwrights of the era, in that his plays were more likely to depict erratic and semi-insane characters versus, for instance, Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare et al. While such poems can seem as performance-oriented as a Spalding Gray monologue, Berman anticipates the criticism in ""Cassette County"" which ends with the compound koan ""anti-showmanship, anti-showmanship, anti-showmanship.Sometimes Berman so singularly wrangles English into uncanny, dream-logic revelation it gives me goddamn chills.