note to "geese make off"
"The reader is not quite sure where the poem started or where it’s headed but quickly catches up, regardless. If you hear Gerard Manley Hopkins in there you’re hearing correctly, with the stressed syllables at the poem’s beginning clustered together to suggest frenzy and urgency. The syntax is often described as ‘broken’ or ‘crumpled’. Dashes and ellipses indicate discontinuity of thought or sudden shifts in focus. The poem jumps here and there. Berryman too was jumpy, in body and mind. The movement is song-like, even dance-like, lyrical in an improvisational but coherent way. Lowell is never lyrical. Of the very few contemporaries to whom Berryman paid serious attention only Roethke has a similar ability to make his verse sing. The youthful Berryman was a splendid dancer – all the girls said so. That was before he began falling down with regularity and breaking bones."
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"All the girls said so" - August Kleinzahler,
"London Review of Books: Vol. 37, No. 13 - 2 July 2015"
