Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #60696 in Books
• Published on: 1986-12-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

From Library Journal
Self-Portrait won a Pulizer Prize, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award, but Ashbery remains famously abstruse. "Something important is going on here," says LJ reviewer Graham Christian, "and on the chance that we figure it out, Selected Poems is worth having."
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
37 Haiku
The Absence Of A Noble Presence
An Additional Poem
And I'd Love You To Be In It
And Others, Vaguer Presences
And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name
Another Chain Letter
As One Put Drunk Into The Packet-boat
As We Know
As You Came From The Holy Land
As You Know
At North Farm
At The Inn
Bird's-eye View Of The Tool And Die Co.
A Blessing In Disguise
Blue Sonata
A Boy
The Bungalows
Business Personals
The Chateau Hardware
Clepsydra
The Couple In The Next Room
Crazy Weather
Daffy Duck In Hollywood
Darlene's Hospital
Decoy
The Ecclesiast
Errors
Fantasia On The Nut-brown Maid, Sels.
Farm Implements And Rutabagas In A Landscape
Faust
Flowering Death
For John Clare
Forties Flick
Friends
Frontispiece
The Gazing Grain
Glazunoviana
Grand Galop
The Grapevine
Haunted Landscape
He
Here Everything Is Still Floating
Hop O' My Thumb
Houseboat Days
How Much Longer Will I Be Able To Inhabit The Divine Sepulcher
The Ice-cream Wars
If The Birds Knew
Illustration
The Instruction Manual
Into The Dusk-charged Air
It Was Raining In The Capital
The Ivory Tower
Just Walking Around
The Lament Upon The Waters
Landscape (after Baudelaire)
Last Month
A Last World
Late Echo
Le Livre Est Sur La Table
The Leasing Of September
Litany, Sels.
The Lonedale Operator
A Long Novel
A Love Poem
Many Wagons Ago
Marchenbilder
Mixed Feelings
More Pleasant Adventures
My Erotic Double
Old Heavens, You Used To Tweak Above Us
Oleum Misericordiae
On The Towpath
The Ongoing Story
Or In My Throat
The Other Cindy
The Other Tradition
Otherwise
Our Youth
The Painter
Paradoxes And Oxymorons
Parergon
The Picture Of Little J.a. In A Prospect Of Flowers
The Pied Piper
Plainness In Diversity
The Plural Of 'jack-in-the-box.'
Popular Songs
Punishing The Myth
Purists Will Object
The Pursuit Of Happiness
Pyrography
Qualm
The Recent Past
Rivers And Mountains
Saying It To Keep It From Happening
Scheherazade
Self-portrait In A Convex Mirror
Silhouette
The Skaters: 4
Some Old Tires
Some Trees
Something Similar
Song
The Songs We Know Best
Sonnet
Soonest Mended
Sortes Vergilianae
Spring Day
Street Musicians
Summer
Syringa
The System
Tapestry
The Task
Thank You For Not Cooperating
Their Day
There Was A Calm Rapture In The Way She Spoke
This Configuration
Thoughts Of A Young Girl
A Tone Poem
Train Rising Out Of The Sea
Two Scenes: 1
Two Scenes: 2
Unctuous Platitudes
Untilted
Unusual Precautions
Variant
Variations, Calypso And Fugue On A Theme Of Ella Wheeler Wilcox
The Vegetarians
A Wave
We Hesitate
Wet Casements
What Is Poetry
Whatever It Is, Wherever You Are
White Roses
Wooden Buildings
Worsening Situation
The Wrong Kind Of Insurance
The Young Son
Some Words
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Customer Reviews

John Ashbery IS a marvellous poet!
It is insulting (and it must be disheartening)for a poet of John Ashbery's stature to be told, again and again, that his poems don't make any sense. Ashbery is artificial superficially. It is his critics who generally seem cold and clever to me. I have laughed and wept over his books! And I am hoping that others my age (I'm 30) will NOT fall into the same trap, which seems toplague older readers, of being smug and vague about their approval of his work (i.e. imitating what they think he's like rather than what he is as a poet.) Like Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath, in different ways, I suppose, we need to establish a new critical basis for discussing his work, which falls outside the conventional opinions and prejudices of the day. This may be only to say, that Ashbery has become a part of the canon of American poetry (this can hardly be denied)--and that raises him to a higher plateau than those poets we see simply as contemporaries; it doesn't make him boring and stiff. Can we enjoy unconventional ideas about this most surprising of poets? For example, as much as I admire Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror as a book and individual poem; I acknowledge it as a masterpiece...I nonetheless don't find it as entertaining and touching, ultimately, as books included in Selected Poems such as Some Trees and Houseboat Days and A Wave. The Tennis Court Oath, which represented a breakthrough both for Ashbery and for poetry, contains some of his most beautiful,rapturous work, like "How Long Will I Be Able To Inhabit The Divine Sepulcher..." I don't think he wrote that freely again, and with such a musical emotional pull, until the later Flow Chart, which is sometimes similar even in extact detail. Bees, for instance: "Will probably always be haunted by a bee" and "polluted in any case by bees." Love is the main theme, after all, of Ashbery entire oeuvre. Somebody once said to me that his poems are like a whiff of perfume. And it's true, in the best sense. Because they are lovely and contain that sort of romanticism and eroticism and one remembers them fondly. He may have, as I believe Pauline Kael wrote about the filmmaker Max Ophuls, "a nostalgia for the present." Although he sometimes risks becoming an objectionable purist himself--he can appear too fussy and argumentative for it's own sake, or even rude, at times--he is mostly kind, fair and balanced, funny though he undeniably is. Who doesn't like a poet like that, or understand him? Even if one has a very different aesthetic, it can be an intoxicating or even comforting voice to listen to. The Selected Poems are a good place to start, but then, if you have a chance, read the whole volumes, and what's come after. You'll have a chance, because they ought to be around forever.

Tangential
John Ashbery once again takes me on a fantastic ride with his four dimentional poetry. Highly recommended for the poet with writer's block because Ashbery teaches us that bounderies are only limited in the mind. I call him tangential because his imagry shoots one into as many directions as one has.

A footnote to my previous review
I don't like to misquote other writers and artists...so, it was, naturally, Bernardo Bertolucci who said about himself that he has "a nostalgia for the present". Ophuls certainly had a nostalgia for the past. My admiration and appreciation for Ashbery's work grows stronger all of the time!