The Meaning of Poems

“Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?” Whitman challenged his readers. In this bracing, audacious, dialogical collection, James Berger takes up the question with a sly, ironic wit that interrogates the idea of poetics and subjects his own assumptions and biases to a ruthless and delightfully honest self-critique. Many poets will see their own agon reflected here. “My project is to slog/ my mortality in the dried vein// of lyric, and to claim// at last my incapacity// as my own.” Yet this is not a poetry of exhaustion, but of self-renewing vitality: Yeats’ foul rag and bone shop or Manny Faber’s termite art, restless, eating away at its own boundaries. Subversive and disarming, Berger charts his development as a poet with humor and panache. It makes for one hell of a ride. 

   Patrick Pritchett