The poems are infused with the voice of a Lost Generation poet defeated before he makes his own glory, defeated by the legacy of poetic giants the likes of Eliot and Pound, and by the accelerating disingenuousness and misdirecting insanity of his century- his century that moved from one atrocity to the next in a blind panic to dispose of all unifying narratives, as though in the hope it could rid itself once and for all of the one narrative that fuels the gaining, encroaching accusing blame and recompense the 20th century will demand in unrelenting perpetuity.
…As Bolaño wrote of the eye that has tried so hard to forget one thing it has forgotten everything else, as Pynchon rightly wrote of his Lethe-water baptized Americans, Berryman, in monstrous solitude, himself mulled on the century and mulled brightly, flashing and yearning with his own power and worked to admit what people so often do not in order to presume toward a critique.
