“Will assistant professors become associates / by working on his works?” All too rarely in the modern university, alas; nevertheless, as the first critical monograph on the poetry of John Berryman to appear since 1987, Brendan Cooper's Dark Airs gestures towards a revivification of Berryman studies sparked by Coleman and McGowan's 2007 essay collection After Thirty Falls. Almost thirty-eight falls after Berryman's death, Cooper makes a strong case for a shift in the canonical paradigm which separates Berryman and his fellow “middle-generation” writers from their more “avant-garde” and “countercultural” contemporaries. To recognize the larger project of “spiritual politics” informing Berryman's work, he argues, is to radically revise perceptions of him as a poet: once we can appreciate this “traumatised hermit” as a man engaged in active dialogue with his culture and his age, what prevents comparisons with an Ashbery, even a Ginsberg?

Cooper offers a succinct survey of the religiopolitical climate of Cold War America that would be of use to anybody studying the period. Berryman's long poems Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and The Dream Songs are situated within the context of the Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, characterized here by a deep cultural “schism”; this is an era in which public faith in America as a “Christian antidote” to Communism was belied by a profound unease at the dawning atomic age. These opening chapters provide an apt backdrop for discussion of Berryman's poetic method as a process of resentful acquisition, incorporating the grim realities of postwar existence via gestures of rebellion against them. Cooper's portrait of modern culture as a “dark air” of descent from Puritan idealism is certainly a persuasive one, substantiated by some enlightening readings. Chapters 4 and 5 are of especial interest to the serious scholar, weaving analysis of several critically overlooked Songs into a convincing rebuttal of Christopher Ricks's 1970 description of that work as a “theodicy”. Indeed, it is this account of Berryman's protagonist Henry as a parodic Job-figure unable “to locate himself securely within any particular religious doctrine” (139) that constitutes the true contribution of Dark Airs to its field: as unsettling as it is compelling, Cooper's argument establishes Berryman as both a product of his age and a prophet gesturing bleakly towards twenty-first-century America.

For all of its assured scholarship, however, Dark Airs remains irrefutably a book of two halves. Cooper directs much introductory ire towards the canonical formulations that separate the “mainstream” from the avant-garde “postmodern,” yet this crucial issue is never integrated fully with his readings of Berryman's poetry. In this light, an essay illustrating comparative possibilities between Lowell and Ginsberg would be directed more fruitfully towards a comparison of Berryman with his anthology opponents. The result is an uneasy synthesis of critical monograph and broader survey, its difficulties compounded by a discussion restricted to just two “abidingly significant works” (10) from Berryman's thirty-seven-year career. Whilst Cooper makes “no apology” for any omissions, at times they feel distinctly self-serving: where are, for example, the cultural resonances and spiritual rebirth of the volume Love & Fame (surely an antidote to the “religious sterility” Dark Airs describes)?

Those with a particular interest in Berryman's work might be forgiven a few further quibbles. Cooper is occasionally guilty of excessive deference to the “personalistic” readings favoured by Haffenden and others; his denial of the New Critics' influence upon Berryman is also curious, given the evidence of such well-wrought apprentice urns as “Meditation.” Yet these objections notwithstanding, Dark Airs represents a vital contribution to Berryman studies, ushering in fresh perspectives on a notoriously “difficult” poet who invited reviewers to “come & diminish me, & map my way.” For in building on the important recent work begun by Coleman and McGowan, Cooper has bucked the dominant trend of diminishing Berryman as a solipsistic confessionalist. His exploration of these works' subversive relationship with their religiopolitical climate instead maps the way towards a reconsideration of Berryman's full oeuvre – a reconsideration that demands we rethink our most fundamental conceptions of the American poetic canon.