Product Review

Berg's extraordinary gifts are devoted, in The Elegy on Hats, to poems mysteriously informed by the work of Charles Baudelaire (the great French master of the prose poem). In Still Unilluminated I…, poems reinvent the work of Arthur Rimbaud.

These poems come out of Berg's life and are placed in twenty-first century America, not nineteenth-century Paris. His masters' influence has reminded some of Joyce's use of Homer in Ulysses. That is quite a mouthful, but it is earned. Where Joyce's Ulysses is set in Dublin, Berg is always an American, urban revolutionary. He makes poetry out of the ordinary, commonplace and material, out of which his sexual and religious visions are passionately made. Stated musically, his poems are played on the cello, accompanied by brass, with wrong note effects that one hears sometimes in Stravinsky's Rites of Spring, with a touch of hip-hop.