HIS TOY, HIS DREAM, HIS REST, by John Berryman; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $6.50. All sections quoted are copyright by John Berryman. Dream Song 172 appears through the courtesy of Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

"RICH CRITICAL Prose"--like Berryman, I, too, dislike it. But this once I am writing because John Berryman, that mad and beloved poet, that heroic neurotic and bearded inventor of terminal diseases, has written an hilarious, pathetic, beautiful book: His Toy, His Dream, His Rest.

The book contains 308 poems, divided into four sections, and these complete a work called "The Dream Songs." The first three sections are in 77 Dream Songs, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1965. The 385 poems are all in one form: three stanzas of six lines each, often rhyming, and occasionally with extra lines. The form is Berryman's own, and he uses it well, making each poem a sort of three-part sonnet.

Nearly all the poems deal with a character named Henry, who is described as anarchic, lustful, huffy, exasperated, wicked, powerful, shy, obsessed, mad, weak, and many other things. Mr. Berryman says that Henry is "not the poet, not me," but we can safely assume that Henry is a projection of Berryman. Indeed one of the major forces behind the Dream Songs is the tension between Henry (Berryman) as subject, poet, public man, and lonely soul. Henry appears as "I," "he," and "you," sometimes he comes in black-face, and once as a sheep.

Berryman uses English with great imagination and flair. There are supposed to be two schools of American poetry: one that is effluent like Whitman and Ginsberg, and one that is precise and economical, like Frost or Lowell. Berryman is a member of both groups, being both extravagant and craftsman-like. One has the feeling that each poem was once much larger, and that he has somehow squeezed it all up. His words expand to take in more and more, and then collapse together, so that when one reads them, they explode in the mind, like the little pills that become animals when one drops them in water. Berryman makes his words work double and triple time, using puns and irony as no one else can. Often the reader is at a total loss--Berryman tries to say so much that his shorthand is sometimes legible only to himself, if at all. It reminds one of Finnegans Wake. What can one make, for instance, of "an egg lined with fur" (272)?

His use of syntax, too, goes beyond even Henry James and Virginia Woolf. He twists and doubles back so much, one often has to parse his verse to make it come out, and even then it doesn't always work.

THE SONGS deal with an astonishing number of subjects. He talks about travel, old age, slavery, politics, poetry readings, Harvard, fame, broken arms, Charles Whitman, Christmas, alcohol, and adultery. Henry's world "is a solemn place, with room for tennis." (175) His major preoccupations are sex:

poor Henry/ for whom ... too much was never enough. (351)

The body is having its day (344)

and God:

Perhaps God is a slob ...

Our only resource is bleak denial (238)

and God has many other surprises (168)

and love:

Cling to me & I promise you'll drown too,