Product Description

Critics, scholars, students, and other readers of contemporary poetry have long appreciated Ashbery's uncanny mastery of the cadence and lyricism of colloquial speech, but they have been less sensitive to the equally important influences in his work of such "outsider" French poets as Arthur Rimbaud, Raymond Roussel, and Isidore Ducasse (a/k/a Count de Lautréamont). These sometimes overlooked presences are wonderfully alive in this collection of lyric poems, which first appeared in 1992. Now back in print, Hotel Lautréamont underscores Ashbery's ability to be both tragic and playful, dense and volatile, passionate and impersonal. As David Herd observed in New Statesman and Society, this is "a poetry fully and startlingly engaged with the way things happen."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1725480 in Books
• Published on: 2000-10-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 157 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Blandishments, chitchat, jokes, parodies, personae and all kinds of slang circulate freely through Ashbery's ( April Galleons ) latest collection. As always, his work will frustrate readers who must know just what it's about. Curious and spectacular details no sooner come up than they vanish; distractions and even boredom have their places; and Ashbery's central preoccupations--passing time, the ambiguities of identity--are as ordinary as they are enduring. The title of the volume alludes to the self-styled Comte de Lautreamont, a 19th-century French author much admired by the Surrealists. By putting the count's name to a commercial establishment for travelers--or providing him with a family seat--Ashbery leads us to consider his relation, as an American, to the traditions of French poetry. He is a past master at slipping across established boundaries of discourse, and the limit of his work is perhaps that it is so entirely urbane. Tempered by irony, his poems are mitigated by sentiment, as if their author is resigned to the fact that the conventions they send up are about as satisfactory as anything gets. Still, the poems continually surprise us with the question of what to make of them. Are they psychological evocations, linguistic abstractions, a commentary on the way we live now, confused echoes of a redeemed tongue, or simply arbitrary in their inspiration? Ashbery's art allows for all these readings--and then some.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
In Ashbery's great work, the mysterious surfaces and atmospheres of his poetry are charged with a unique power, as evasive yet as luminous as an aurora borealis, rendering his difficulties well worth the undertaking for serious readers. Unfortunately, in his first book since last year's Flow Chart ( LJ 5/1/91), Ashbery seems caught in a tedium vitae that flattens out his best effects with inconsequences, the elegiac occulted by the depressive. In this collection, too long by at least half, Ashbery alternates between launching his style in a more jarringly surrealist direction and just meandering along, "living the life/ reserved for those who have never thought things out clearly," telling us "To mope/ is human; I mope, therefore I am." There are some lovely poems here, but they are crowded out by many lesser renditions written in the manner to which their author is perhaps too accustomed. For completists.
- Frank J. Lepkowski, Oakland Univ., Rochester, Mich.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"No poet is more surreal, more disjuctive and musical, more subtly allusive . . . than John Ashbery. In [this book] he is also tremendously funny. You don't have to understand these poems to love them; you need only that suspension of disbelief that constitutes an audience's pleasure before the magician's flourishes and wonders."--Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World

"Underneath his genius for stylistic play sounds another, harder voice: its tones--intimate, edgy, ultimately heartbroken--reveal with great poignancy Mr. Ashbery's knowledge of the difference between writing and life."--Tom Sleigh, The New York Times Book Review
-- Review

Customer Reviews

Ashbery Deserves Better
This intriguing, surreal book of poems does not deserve the nasty treatment dished out by the (until now) sole reviewer of this book. I was appalled not just by the mean-spirited nature of the review but also by how strikingly different my impression of Hotel Lautreamont is. It is as though we read two different books. Whatever grudge the earlier reviewer is obviously harboring toward Mr. Ashbery, please do not let this pedantic vocabulary fetishist deter you from a truly rewarding experience.

PS: The uninformed slur on General Grant is worthy of a duel!

Yes
As daring as Ulysses Grant, as timorous as Tennyson, as bold as Beddoes, this imbroglio of tepid vignettes, this rebarbative hymnal of blithe spirituals, never ceases to fascinate the "hypocrite lecteur" -- until, of course, it does.