A scion of the New York School, Edmund Berrigan grew up in and around
poetry. More Gone, number 18 in the Spotlight Poetry Series, is his
first full-length collection in a decade, as well as the first to
follow-up to his well-received memoir *Can It!*Written in a distinctive
mix of New York quotidian and post-Language abstraction, More Gone
documents the poet's search for domestic tranquility amidst the city
that never sleeps. Berrigan draws on a variety of materials, from songs
to found language, assembling them into poems of oblique humor and wry
perspective on the challenges of everyday existence. These poems aren't
anecdotes or confessions so much as objects in their own right, even as
they remain rooted in a recognizable urban landscape: "Mostly, the city
is begging for love, grieving, / or telling us to back the fuck off."
In More Gone, Eddie Berrigan shows so much writing savvy it has long
sleeves, on which he wears his heart. There are poems with strategic non
sequiturs which yield an inherent logic that convinces and leads to
unfamiliar perceptions. There are multi-line riffs during which he works
the count, throwing three or four different pitches. The last will look
like a fastball, but it's a slider, low and away, and down you go. In
simpler compositions he redirects you with subtle shifts of time and
context. He includes himself, which gives a poem its worth. A vulnerable
and movingly confident self. He impresses with deep impressions.--John
Godfrey
The language employed in Edmund Berrigan's More Gone infuses itself on
the lateral plane, variegated as it is by glints from particulars that
rely 'on sensory input to motion.' He teases beauty out of terminus via
tenuous electrification. One feels clarity evince itself through an
opaque psychic transparency, a transparency that magically filters
lingual seepage. Thus, our consciousness is marked by an incremental
elevation providing us with an experience of language that engages our
capacity to cast greater light on the stark complexity that we optically
imbibe as daily reality.--Will Alexander
Edmund Berrigan's poems may be 'more gone, ' but they are also more
here. 'Anxious, patient and sentient, ' they happen at an intimate core
of self, family, community, and world, webbing out in all our
neighboring shades and activities of being, where experience glitches
and knits. They are rollercoastery, beautiful, knowing, revelatory, and
real.--Eleni Sikelianos
