The New York Times Book Review, David Kirby
Berman's is a funny, smart, on-again, off-again poetry of great promise.
The New Yorker, October 4, 1999
"David Berman is a young Virginian poet with a sly, intense regard for the past. He comes on like a prankster, restocking the imperial orations of Wallace Stevens and the byzantine monologues of John Ashbery with the pop-cultural bric-a-brac of a new generation: 'I am not a cub scout seduced by Iron Maiden's mirror worlds.' But his words have and easy, eloquent gait; each line needs to be a line. The landscapes are crisply American, and history, especially Southern history, casts a shadow. A poem about the death of Lincoln ends, 'The assassin was in mid-air/when the stagehands wheeled out the clouds.'"
