The best-known work in “The Heart Is Strange” is probably “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet” (1953), a long poem about the American colonial-era poet Anne Bradstreet. It’s an important piece of work, witty and elegiac and even sexy at times, but also academic, not worth the price of admission.

Daniel Swift, the volume’s editor, is blowing a certain amount of wind when he calls the Bradstreet poem Berryman’s “masterpiece,” even though he backtracks to remark that he is using that term “in the old-fashioned sense of the word — the early work that proves an apprentice is now a master of his chosen form.”

There are excellent things in “The Heart Is Strange,” among them a remarkable poem called “Mr Pou & the Alphabet,” which has not previously appeared among Berryman’s published poetry. It was written in 1961 for a young son he no longer lived with, and it begins:

A is for awful, which things are;

B is for bear them, well as we can.

It ends:

W’s for why, which ask and ask;

X is Xmas, where I cannot be.

Y is for Yes (do his Daddy love he?)

Z is for zig-zag — a part of our task.

(Straight’s better, but few can.

My Xmas hope: boy head for man.)

This poem, in its stealthy way, begins to seem like one of the great divorce poems in the English language. You have to sit down for a while after consuming it.

There’s no pleasure in warning readers away from a Berryman book. I’d be shucking my obligation not to, instead, make a renewed case for “The Dream Songs.” It’s a book that collects Berryman’s original 77 dream songs and adds the further 308 he later wrote. This new edition includes a fond, funny and brilliant introduction by the poet and translator Michael Hofmann.

Here is Berryman’s masterpiece, one of those books of American poetry that, like certain mountains, has its own weather. Berryman found his form in these songs. They are serious, ambitious and elastic arrangements he could put everything into, high culture and low, Shakespeare as well as the blues, strong religious feeling as well as low impulses of every variety.