It's been over forty years since Auden selected Ashbery for the
Yale Younger Poets, and time has revealed the method to Ashbery's
surreal madness: difficult, disjunctive, dreamlike, his poems exist
for their own sake, imploring us to luxuriate in their very
immediacy. Ashbery's jaunty and urbane poems feign naivete, a faux
casualness - jokey and chatty - that's betrayed by his sudden
bursts of measured abstraction. In "Tangled Stars," he puns his
denial of personality: "I decline the irregular verbs/of which our
life is composed," and elsewhere makes sport of history ("the past
never happened here"). "The Friend at Midnight" reminds us that
"everything is its own reward," that each day bears its own
"canonicity," that only the utter nowness of things can spare us
"the mess of inner living" ("Dear Sir or Madam"). Dizzying in their
non-sense, Ashbery's centerless tropes sing their own disapproval:
a warning to readers untutored in his "churlish ways" - this is
poetry at its most demanding, and not always worth the candle.
(Kirkus Reviews)
Passions, leaves, loves, flutes, insects, paintings, apologies, and
partings, all feature in this collection of poetry by Pulitzer
Prize-winning author, John Ashbery.
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