Actual Air

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Avoided this for a long time because I assumed these were gussied up variations of David Berman's lyrics for The Silver Jews. 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. My copy has become tatty from carrying it around in my laptop bag, I've had it for a few weeks and It's stayed in the side pocket while 5-6 novels have been and gone. This was an absolutely wonderful and enriching read, and I implore everyone to spend some time with Berman's work. I think there’s a sort of (potentially stereotype-like, though not to me) concept of what the working-class life might seem like in terms of day-to-day details at home with “appliance failures on Olive Street” and “the complex Italians versus the basic Italians”.

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.He died in Park Slope, I was there just a few days before, visiting friends, wandering around, soaking in the beauty of a part of America I have come to really love in my later years. 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. However, the first poem in this collection, "Snow", I had read before; it may be a "greatest hit" of sorts for him, as there seem to be a lot of online references and commentary about it. David Berman reinvents the overlooked and seemingly ordinary details of everyday life--from the suitcase of a departing girlfriend to a baseboard electrical outlet.

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. However, despite his musical genius, Berman considers himself first and foremost a poet, as he should. These artists are suffering and I'd trade all the comfort of their music for them to have not been suffering.In conversation with Mason, Billy Collins said the poems of Actual Air "are full of complex turns and tricks and conceptual hijinks, and yet there's this surface clarity.