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Only Sing

John Berryman

The never-before-published poems of one of the great American poets, edited and introduced by Shane McCrae.

4 in stock

£12.99
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780571400133
Date Published
29.01.2026

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Summary

The never-before-published poems of one of the great American poets, edited and introduced by Shane McCrae.

Only Sing is a continuation of John Berryman’s vast project The Dream Songs. These 152 never-before-published poems are an expansion of this epic of the American twentieth-century psyche.

In the voice and figure of Henry – riddled with desire, self-loathing and a permanent sense of being odds with the world – Berryman created, in the words of McCrae, ‘a hero for a disenchanted nation’.

Berryman never saw these dream songs in print but he was content that if they ever appeared, it would ‘be up to the reader to fit those poems in among the published ones’.

Critic Reviews

[Berryman] is the consummate word-juggler of the ?“confessional”? movement, and the poet who most adventurously catches the tragicomedy of modern existence . . . The fierce and beautiful oddities of his language, and the brave open-heartedness of his written response to life, are proving a form of greatness, and a source of inspiration for those who follow in his turbulent wake

Andrew Motion, Observer

Critic Reviews

A treasure trove for Berryman fanatics and new readers alike

Oluwaseun Olayiwola, Guardian best recent poetry

Critic Reviews

At their best, in the published Dream Songs, Berryman’s lines lodge in your mind and won’t be dislodged

Cal Revely-Calder, Daily Telegraph

JohnBerryman

John Berryman (1914-72) was born John Smith in McAlester, Oklahoma. He graduated from Columbia in 1936, and went on to study at Cambridge University. He later held posts at Harvard and Princeton, before taking up a professorship at the University of Minnesota. Berryman won the Pulitzer Prize in 1965 for 77 Dream Songs, and he continued to build upon this…

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JohnBerryman