Re: Recovery / John Berryman

Will Dockery wrote:

>
What a find, it turns out. I came across a nice hardcover copy of a John
Berryman book I'd never seen or heard of, "Recovery", at the local used
book store a week or so ago, for just a couple of bucks.
>
I was only aware of John Berryman's poetry, thanks to Rick Howe's
comparisons of my poetry with his in a review back in the 1980s... and
the Dream Songs poetry. So this was obscure to me, but turns out
"Recovery" is obscure, and rare, all around.
>
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/underrated-tremendous-delirium-the-case-for-berrymans-recovery-1401026.html
>
"There is a glum irony to the fact that John Berryman's novel Recovery
(1973)... Recovery is a fragment, it is a dazzling fragment, every bit
as rich and macaberesquely comic as anything in Berryman's better known
poems. While its structure is simple - in therapy, its autobiographical
hero is remorselessly stripped of the delusions which foster his
drinking - its pages teem with asides on everything from immunology to
Courbet, from Plato's letters to the wisdom of Polonius's homilies..."
>
"...It was no more than a glimpse: on the morning of 7 January 1972,
Berryman threw himself from a bridge over the Mississippi. His legacy
was some of the greatest poetry of the post-War period (still in print),
some fine literary essays (out of print) and Recovery, a lost, glorious
ruin of a novel worth more than any number of glibly polished fictions."
>
And a great, though slightly harrowing, read.

>
Mayhaps G.D. can excerpt from this volume..?
>
PING... George Dance....