“Yeats twice sailed to Byzantium—on paper. But what songs are brought back by a truly “travelled man,” who wanders the world, and who has “read and thought”? They are the lyrics, the lures and allures awaiting the traveler of Dark Berries—from the streets of Paris, Jakarta, Tokyo, and Babylon, to the midnight vigils, the markets of flesh and fruit, and the blear of the dawn bullet-train. For Clifford Bernier, strangeness and passion move between “primordial waters” and the frieze of the stars. Can we escape into the exotic and erotic, or do we kneel before the “geometry of home”? Imagination’s growth, and the body’s lethal growth, compete in Dark Berries: compete for “blood in the bone of the spine of the book.”
—David Gewanter, Author, War Bird