Product Description

Ashbery fans will welcome this collection of one hundred and twelve poems where the signature qualities of Ashbery's greatest work are on every page with a new intensity and power.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1795977 in Books
• Published on: 1997-04-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 188 pages

Amazon.com Review
Of this excellent work, Marjorie Perloff writes: "Literary echoes, puns, paragrams, and mini-narratives collide so as to create the image of a world bursting with memories and overflowing with possibilities--a world like no one else's." John Ashbery, long admired for his wit, craft, and assured (if sometimes bewildered) tone, has outdone himself here. Notice especially the tour de force, "Eternity Sings the Blues."

From Publishers Weekly
The talky voice that has been unflappably echoing American culture and crossing it with higher-tone concerns returns in a fullness of wry, observant wit. Ashbery (And the Stars Were Shining) is clearly uncomfortable with the academic industry that has grown up around him: many of these poems directly address readers, critics and would-be biographers: "suppose this poem were about you?would you/ put in the things I've carefully left out" he asks, coolly enumerating such possibilities as "descriptions of pain, and sex." Ashbery is best known for wrapping philosophical musings in a candy-coated shell, pointing out the hairline cracks of irony. He's at it still, in poems like "My Philosophy of Life," which concludes: "Still, there's a lot of fun to be had in the gaps between ideas./ That's what they're made for! Now I want you to go out there/ and enjoy yourself, and yes, enjoy your philosophy of life, too./ They don't come along every day. Look out! There's a big one..." In these 100-plus short lyrics, prose poems and one long poem, Ashbery continues to charm us into thought.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
The often-cited "difficulty" of Ashbery's poetry lies in its refusal to separate clearly the intrinsic from the extraneous. It comes to us unlabeled and uncompromised: "an aesthetic remoteness blossoming profusely/but vaguely around what does/stand out here and there." But like abstract paintings that leave us awestruck for no easily articulated reason, the poems generate waves of infinitely ponderable possibilities. Enabled by Ashbery's mastery of syntax, haywire similes (summer takes spring away "like a terrier a lady has asked me to hold for a moment"), and linguistic congeniality ("Gosh, what a limited bunch of things to do there is."), they offer rich cascades of surprise, colloquies of disparate voices that may or may not emanate from the same consciousness. And as funny as Ashbery allows himself to be ("You don't learn the cancan at obedience school"), his oblique forays into the traditional poetic genres of elegy ("Others Shied Away") and meditation ("My Philosophy of Life") are genuinely affecting. Recommended.?Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, N.Y.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.