This collection brings together in a single volume a wide range of John Berryman's earlier work. It includes the complete contents of The Dispossessed, a selection published in 1948 which has been out of print; and all the poems in His Thought Made Pockets & the Plane Buckt, privately issued in a limited edition in 1958; and "Formal Elegy," written in 1963 on the occasion of the death of President Kennedy. There are sixy-four poems in all.

Mr. Berryman calls the collection Short Poems, despite the noticeable length of several of the poems, no doubt to distinguish this book from his long work-in-progress, The Dream Songs, from Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, and from the recently published sequence, Berryman's Sonnets.