Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs

The Dream Songs is an epic of the American twentieth-century psyche. Henry, its protagonist, falls in and out of love, and falls in and out of the hospital; he sings of joy and desire, and of being at odds with the world. He is lustful; he is depressed. In the words of Shane McCrae, he is 'a hero for a disenchanted nation, from which once-common beliefs have mostly fled. He does not mourn the disappearance of those beliefs; he has held onto the beliefs he could.' In Only Sing, McCrae has gathered 152 additional dream songs that Berryman never saw published in his lifetime. This collection is a continuation of Berryman's vast project, an additional set of poems that crack language open, shot through with searing insight.