This long-awaited volume, a new selection of his later poems, spans ten major collections by one of America's most visionary and influential poets. Chosen by the author himself, the poems in "Notes from the Air" represent John Ashbery's best work from the past two decades, from the critically acclaimed "April Galleons" and "Flow Chart" to the 2005 National Book Award finalist "Where Shall I Wander."

While Ashbery has long been considered a powerful force in twentieth-century culture, "Notes from the Air" demonstrates clearly how important and relevant his writing continues to be, well into the twenty-first century. Many of the selections found here are regularly taught in university classrooms across the country, and critics and scholars vigorously debate his newest works as well as his classics. He has already published four major books since the turn of the new millennium, and, although 2007 marked his eightieth birthday, this legendary literary figure continues to write fresh, new, and vibrant poetry that remains as stimulating, provocative, and controversial as ever.

"Notes from the Air" reveals, for the first time in one volume, the remarkable evolution of Ashbery's poetry from the mid-1980s into the new century, and offers an irresistible sampling of some of the finest work by a poet the "New York Times" has called a "national treasure."

John Ashbery's new collection of fifty-one poems ends with the substantial piece that gives the book its title. Composed in stanzaic prose, it is a fine specimen of his distinctive courtship mode, wooing the language with language, teasing it and teasing out of it a Protean lover that loves Protean him back: a you, an I, in a wild variety of registers and postures. Throughout "Where Shall I Wander" the effable and ineffable are in dialogue; time ('then' and 'now') and the stable moments of the poem are within earshot of one another, but cannot ever quite touch hands. There are ghosts and presences, some unexpected like Ali Baba, Arabia Deserta (down to the turning spit and braised goat) and Mrs Hanratty's apron; others like Holderlin are more insistently entertained, in a poetry that fractures and reinvents syntax, cadence and our sense of beauty, this tribute informed by the terror of Holderlin's later world in which it is impossible not to share.

Breathlike

Just as the day could use another hour, I need another idea. Not a conceptor a slogan. Something more like a rutmade thousands of years ago by one of the firstwheels as it rolled along. It never came backto see what it had done, and the rutjust stayed there, not thinking of itselfor calling attention to itself in any way.Sun baked it. Water stood, or rather satin it. Wind covered it with dust, then blew itaway. Always it was available to itselfwhen it wished to be, which wasn't often.

Then there was a cup and ball theoryI told you about. A lot of people had left the coast.Squirt conditions obtained. I forgot I overwhelmed youonce upon a time, between everybody's sound sleepand waking afterward, trying to piece togetherwhat had happened. The rut glimmeredthrough centuries of snow and after.I suppose it was trying to make some pointbut we never found out about that, having come to know each other years laterwhen our interest in zoning had revived again.

Thrill of a Romance

It's different when you have hiccups.
Everything is--so many glad hands competing
for your attention, a scarf, a puff of soot,
or just a blast of silence from a radio.
What is it? That's for you to learn
to your dismay when, at the end of a long queue
in the cafeteria, tray in hand, they tell you the gate closed down
after the Second World War. Syracuse was declared capital
of a nation in malaise, but the directorate
had other, hidden goals. To proclaim logic
a casualty of truth was one.

Everyone's solitude (and resulting promiscuity)
perfumed the byways of villages we had thought civilized.
I saw you waiting for a streetcar and pressed forward.
Alas, you were only a child in armor. Now when ribald toasts
sail round a table too fair laid out, why the consequences
are only dust, disease and old age. Pleasant memories
are just that. So I channel whatever
into my contingency, a vein of mercury
that keeps breaking out, higher up, more on time
every time. Dirndls spotted with obsolete flowers,
worn in the city again, promote open discussion.

The poems in Breezeway move lightly between the everyday world, with its pleasures and absurdities, and the worlds of literature and art, with theirs. John Ashbery's poems are haunting, surprising, hilarious, and knowing, the work of an old and always a new master with an uncanny understanding of our age, its fears and fragmentation, its fulfilments. Here is Mr Salteena and the station of the Metro, demystified Middle English mysticism and a peculiarly-paced samba, a drugstore, a supermarket, Batman and his dog Pastor Fido, all concluding in 'A Sweet Disorder', in which Herrick is decisively transformed: 'Pardon my sarong. I'll have a Shirley Temple.'

This book places poetry by Ashbery (1927-2017), gathered from his later collections, in conversation with a selection of contemporaneous art writing. In addition, as Ashbery loved music and listened to it while writing, the "playlists" here offer representative samplings of music from these same years, culled from Ashbery's own library of recordings. Ashbery's poetry is frequently described as ekphrastic, though, rather than writing a poem "based on'' or "inspired" by the content of an artwork of or piece of music, he engages with how the experience of seeing it and the artistic strategies employed offer ways of thinking about it and through it. Many of the observations from Ashbery's art writing also offer keys to how we might read his poetry. Many of the recordings he listened to feature contemporary classical works that emphasize complex textures, disparate sounds, and disjunct phrases. Ashbery's poetry similarly plays with a diversity of poetic textures and sudden turns such that a reader might construct multiple narratives or pathways of meaning. He rarely offers linear stories or focuses on evocative descriptions of a scene or object. In exploring this ekphrastic book project, the reader is invited to discover how, for Ashbery, these three forms might illuminate and inform one another.

To mark John Ashbery's 70th birthday, Carcanet publish his first five books of poems in a single volume: "The Tennis Court Oath" (1962); "Same Trees" (1956); "Rivers and Mountains" (1966); "The Double Dream of Spring" (1970); and "Three Poems" (1972).

First published in 1984 and now appearing in a new edition, A Wave is widely considered one of Ashbery's finest books of poetry. The 44 pieces collected here--particularly the long title-poem--find the poet applying his uniquely lyric, meditative, and often hilarious sensibility to the mysterious and incessant curves and crests of love, art, thought, experience, and selfhood.

"Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award and the National Book Critics' Circle Award. The long title poem, a meditation on Parmigianino's famous self-portrait, has become Ashbery's best-known poem. It is accompanied here by a number of shorter pieces - playful, witty, elusive. The collection remains one of the most significant poetic achievements of our time.

"Clare's modernity is a kind of nakedness of vision that we are accustomed to, at least in America, from the time of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, down to Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg. Like these poets, Clare grabs hold of you ... tell[s] you about himself, about the things that are closest and dearest to him ... It is like ... 'instant intimacy.'"

"What then are we to do with a body of poetry whose author warns us that we have very little chance of understanding it? ... Why, misread it, of course, if it seems to merit reading ... This is what happens to any poetry: no poem can ever hope to produce the exact sensation in even one reader that the poet intended; all poetry is written with this understanding on the part of the poet and reader; if it can't stand the test of what Harold Bloom names 'misprision, ' then we leave it to pass on to something else".

"And why, anyway, should there be but one reading? Once after a poetry reading, I was asked one of those un-questions that people ask poets: 'Do you make up your ideas or do they just come to you?' I was so busy wishing I knew the answer that I forgot to ask why both couldn't be the case, and several other things as well. 'The Visitor' could as well be a parable of Eden, of Christ accepting the inevitability of martyrdom, or it could be only a story whose meaning is self-contained ... The central axis of ambiguity is Schubert's own".

John Ashbery writes like no one else among contemporary American poets. In the construction of his intricate patterns, he uses words much as the contemporary painter uses form and color- words painstakingly chosen as conveyors of precise meaning, not as representations of sound. These linked in unexpected juxtapositions, at first glance unrelated and even anarchic, in the end create by their clashing interplay a structure of dazzling brilliance and strong emotional impact. From this preoccupation arises a poetry that passes beyond conventional limits into a highly individual realm of effectiveness, one that may be roughly likened to the visual world of Surrealist painting. Some will find Mr. Ashbery's work difficult, even forbidding; but those who are sensitive to new directions in ideas and the arts will discover here much to quicken and delight them.
A 35th anniversary edition of classic work from a celebrated American poet who has received the Pulitzer Prize, the national Book Award, and the national Book Critics Circle Award. John Ashbery's second book, The Tennis Court Oaths, first published by Wesleyan in 1962, remains a touchstone of contemporary avant-garde poetry.

John Ashberry won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Ashberry reaffirms the poetic powers that have made him such an outstanding figure in contemporary literature. This new book continues his astonishing explorations of places where no one has ever been.

Parallel Movement of the Hands collects five long, serial poems (and prose poems) which John Ashbery left unfinished and will become part of his archive at Harvard University's Houghton Library. 'In-progress and realised' as their editor Emily Skillings puts it, these abundant poems are characteristic of the mature work of this American master, an adept of the glories of American speech, who is alert to its insinuating logics and its wild goose chases through popular culture and secret histories. In these poems, Carl Czerny rubs shoulders with the Hardy Boys, Robert Mapplethorpe and Eadweard Muybridge, all of them integrated into Ashbery's generous, omnivorous forms. 'How could I have had such a good idea?' the poet asks in 'The History of Photography'. So many good ideas, such a wealth of surprising points of departure.

Exquisite hardcover gift edition of the groundbreaking poetry collection by the leader of the "New York School" of poetry, Frank O'Hara. Published on the 50th anniversary of Lunch Poems. Lunch Poems, first published in 1964 by City Lights Books as number nineteen in the Pocket Poets series, is widely considered to be Frank O'Hara's freshest and most accomplished collection of poetry. Edited by the poet in collaboration with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Donald Allen, who had published O'Hara's poems in his monumental The New American Poetry in 1960, it contains some of the poet's best known works including "The Day Lady Died," "Ave Maria," and "Poem" [Lana Turner has collapsed!]. These are the compelling and formally inventive poems-casually composed, for example, in his office at The Museum of Modern Art, in the street at lunchtime or on the Staten Island Ferry en route to a poetry reading-that made O'Hara a dynamic leader of the "New York School" of poets. This new limited 50th anniversary edition contains a preface by John Ashbery and an editor's note by City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, along with facsimile reproductions of a selection of previously unpublished correspondence between Ferlinghetti and O'Hara that shed new light on the preparation of Lunch. "I hope that everyone will delight in the new edition of Frank's LUNCH POEMS. The correspondence between Lawrence and Frank is great. Frank was just 33 when he wrote to Lawrence in 1959 and 38 when LUNCH POEMS was published! The fact that City Lights kept Frank's LUNCH POEMS in print all these years has been extraordinary, wonderful and a constant comfort. Hurray for independent publishers and independent bookstores. Many thanks always to Lawrence Ferlinghetti and everyone at City Lights." -Maureen O'Hara, sister of Frank O'Hara "O'Hara speaks directly across the decades to our hopes and fears and especially our delights; his lines are as intimate as a telephone call. Few books of his era show less age."-Dwight Garner, New York Times "As collections go, none brings . . . quality to the fore more than the thirty-seven Lunch Poems, published in 1964 by City Lights."-Nicole Rudick, The Paris Review "What O'Hara is getting at is a sense of the evanescence, and the power, of great art, that inextricable contradiction - that what makes it moving and transcendent is precisely our knowledge that it will pass away. This is the ethos at the center of Lunch Poems: not the informal or the conversational for their own sake but rather in the service of something more intentional, more connective, more engaged." -David L. Ulin, Los Angeles TImes "The collection broadcasts snark, exuberance, lonely earnestness, and minute-by-minute autobiography to a wide, vague audience-much like today's Twitter and Facebook feeds."-Micah Mattix, The Atlantic

After his spectacular early career, in which he became one of the best-loved and most controversial poets of his time, and his radical and productive middle years, John Ashbery continued effortlessly finding new directions in the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, writing playfully, inventively. His language is exquisitely attuned to mundane reality, transforming it. Here in a single, substantial, authoritative, and helpfully annotated volume are seven complete books from this crucial period, starting with Flow Chart (1991), a tour de force that shows Ashbery's mastery of `the entire orchestral potential of the English language,' as Helen Vendler put it. It complements Ashbery's earlier Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, offering a vision of the collective `dream of everyday life that was our / beginning, and where we still live, out in the open, under clouds stacked up in a holding pattern / like pictures in a nineteenth-century museum.' The poems range across Ashbery's varied interests and obsessions - opera, film noir, French poetry, the visual arts. Everywhere is his boundless inventiveness, his pitch-perfect ear for American speech, his exuberant erudition. The book ends with twenty-six uncollected poems, among them `Hoboken', a collage that pillages Roget's Thesaurus, and much else.

For the first time, "The New York Poets" gathers in a single volume the best work of four extraordinary poets: Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler. By the early 1950s all four were settled in Manhattan, collaborating, competing and encouraging each other's radical experiments with language and form. Much of their work reflects their participation in the creative energies of the New York art scene, 'the floods of paint', to quote James Schuyler, 'in whose crashing surf we all scramble'. Believing that anything could be material for a poem, they transformed American poetry with their irreverent wit and daring. Mark Ford's anthology is an essential introduction to four poets whose work has influenced poetry around the world. It includes detailed background information and a substantial bibliography.

After John Ashberry's "Flow Chart" (1991), "Hotel Lautreamont" (1992) and "And the Stars were Shining" (1994), this work provides an A-Y of poems, moments in which voices, images and tones come in for his attention. The poems are generally short, except for "T" when "Tuesday Evening" occurs. The poem begins in tight rhymed quatrains; as the evening extends, the verse relaxes to elicit and swallow up more and more, until only rhyme pins together the impulse and reflection. Ashberry's imagination remains subject to time's encroachment and the heart's vagaries. Ashberry was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award for "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" (1975).

John Ashbery's "Collected Poems 1956-1987" contains the complete text of the poet's first twelve books, from "Some Trees" (1956), selected for publication by W.H. Auden, to "April Galleons" (1987), and including "The Vermont Notebook" (1975) with the original artwork by Joe Brainard, and "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" (1976), which won the Pulitzer Prize, together with a selection of more than sixty previously uncollected poems. To read Ashbery's work in sequence is to experience the magnitude of his presence in American poetry over these four decades, as innovator and influence. His poetry, 'an exuberant script for survival' (Marina Warner), 'light-footed and delectably irresponsible' (Alfred Brendel), fascinates with virtuosic complexity and delights with wry humour. A restless explorer of the modern world, alive to language and impression, Ashbery enlarges the possibilities of poetry. With a detailed chronology and notes on the poems, "Collected Poems 1956-1987" is an indispensable compilation of the work of one of the essential poets of our time.

In "Your Name Here", a title suggested by bullfight posters hawked to tourists who then fill in their name as "terero", John Ashbery continues to examine preoccupations of age, loss, childhood memories and how the magic of dreams can transform daily living. In the opening poem he asks "Why do I tell you these things? You are not even here". Yet via poems of conflicting styles and tone, Ashbery tells us very much more about his imaginings and invites the reader to "personalize" hsi words with their own associations.

Passions, leaves, loves, flutes, insects, paintings, apologies, and partings, all feature in this collection of poetry by Pulitzer Prize-winning author, John Ashbery.

During his career John Ashbery has been hailed as the "eminence grise" of postmodernism, championed by W.H. Auden and has carried off every major literary prize. His startling work alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) playful and recondite, affirms poetry's power to astonish and tackle fundamentals. Drawn from the work he published up to 1984, from the spare, beautiful lyrics of "Some Trees" and the disjunctive, experimentalism of "The Tennis Court Oath", to the powerful mediations on subjectivity of "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" and "A Wave", this collection makes a wide range of this poet's writing available.

This 16th collection by the author contains 59 comic and lyrical poems, including the 13-part title-poem. John Ashbery was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.