These poems fascinate me; they superficially resemble a whole host of Dylanesque "throw together a bunch of unrelated images and see what sticks" poetry that does nothing at all for me, but somehow there's something different here. I don't know much in this life, but I know that my life, and the lives of so many people I know, were made happier, and deeper, and stranger, and more beautiful, because David Berman lived and wrote. has been a dark year, and hearing lines like "I spent a decade playing chicken with oblivion" can be a comfort when you finally feel understood. The poetry has “music”; when read aloud, one gets more from it than when one reads it on the page in many spots.

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. He graduated from the Greenhill School in Addison, Texas, the University of Virginia, and the University of Massachusetts. 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. Though he thought music had a better chance at fighting against the establishment, the powerful, those causing injustice, this book is healing and heartbreaking. 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.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?

The ones that are neither here nor there are flooded by the stop/start fuckbrilliance of the others. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. The Virginia-born poet and the lead singer of the Silver Jews expresses his observations of pop-culture, Southern history, souvenirs, community colleges, back pain, hallways, and the weirdness of daily life. i love david berman’s songwriting, but he’s able to link disparate images more effectively with an instrumental backing.July) FYI: Actual Air is the first release of Open City Books, a press that is affiliated with Open City magazine. However, despite his musical genius, Berman considers himself first and foremost a poet, as he should. self-portrait at 28" is a work of particular brilliance; each time i read it i am piqued and comforted, loving it anew. David Kirby of The New York Times likened the "whimsy" of Actual Air to the works of poets Mark Halliday and Campbell McGrath, but felt "In their poems, though, whimsy always leads to serious ideas and emotions that don't consistently materialize here. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.