Actual Air

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I knew that the best things were hidden, and all of this was said in a private voice, a cousin to the one I used to speak to pets. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. 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. 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. These artists are suffering and I'd trade all the comfort of their music for them to have not been suffering.

To list or quote favorite lines would be pointless, because I see now it was indeed his body of work that meant so much and was so special to me. there is a beautiful artlessness to david berman's poetry that belies the breadth of his content and vision. 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. First, not using the commas in “finally setting sun”, so that it means the sun is finally setting, rather than one that has built the plot that involves the setting sun… a subtle thing but one that changes the meaning for the best; “flat earth of chessboards” evokes both the reality that in a sense “chessboards” were, in game form, the depiction of war, but at the same time the idea that the upper classes perhaps played this game, among others, during their salons; “John Webster’s antique jive” then breaks the spell. 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?Often as I read his poetry, I was struck by the idea that Berman used one of those word/phrase generators that push out unexpected combinations of words. 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. There is a touch of James Tate and Charles Simic brewing in the poetry, and it is a shame that I came to this so later.

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. 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).Or talking about signing his name on the lower corner of a window so the world becomes his art through his perception of it.