Product Description

I got kind of frenzied after the waiting
had stopped, but now am cool as a suburban garden
in some lost city. When it came time for my speech
I could think of nothing, of course.
I gave a little talk about the onion - how its flavor
inspires us, its shape informs our architecture.
There were so many other things I wanted to say, too,
but, dandified, I couldn't strut,
couldn't sit down for all the spit and polish.
Now it's your turn to say something about the wall
in the garden. It can be anything.
- from "Terminal"

In his twentieth collection, John Ashbery continues to examine the themes that have preoccupied him of late: age and its inevitable losses, memories of childhood, the transforming magic of dreams in daily living. Your Name Here offers souvenirs to readers, inviting them to "personalize" the poems with their own associations and memories. Ashbery's masterful voice is heard with renewed vigor and poigancy in these beautiful poems.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1608576 in Books
• Published on: 2001-10-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780374527839
• Condition: USED - VERY GOOD
• Notes:
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Ashbery may be America's most influential living poet, and its most widely admired. Traditional critics like Harold Bloom admire his lyrical flourishes of prophecy and regret; experimentalists, quite as justly, praise his verbal outlandishness and tonal intricacy, his comic moments and slippery transitions. Both will find much to like in this 20th collection, which (like much of his '90s poetry) combines flamboyant, temporary poses with serious explorations of mortality and nostalgia: "If only I could get the tears out of my eyes it would be raining now," one page concludes: "I must try the new, fluid approach." Typically, a new Ashbery poem will zip and twist from context to context, person to person, from silly to sad to hopeful and back again. More than ever, Ashbery plays games with his readersAthough the games frequently get called off midplay: "Not You Again" begins "Thought I'd write you this poem. Yes,/ I know you don't need it.... Just want to kind of get it off my chest/ and drop it in the peanut dust." Readers bowled over by some parts of this volume may find Ashbery's lesser poems too much alike, their whimsical stanzas not quite adding up. But the best poems here are one of a kind: the hilarious (and atypically coherent) "Memories of Imperialism," for example, which imagines that Admiral Dewey (of Philippines fame) invented the Dewey decimal system. Among the jokes, mix-ups and quick costume changes, two constants are campy slang and a deep sense of loss: "If all you want is kittens, come back later... 'What if I said I want no kittens,/ just a big fat you?'" Some will see, in the book's many versions of "you," Ashbery's longtime partner Pierre Martory, who died in 1998, and to whom he dedicates the volume. A line of serious elegies and laments, emerging gradually and understatedly, leads at last to the astonishing, brief "Strange Cinema," also dedicated to Martory. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Ashbery is and has long been an astonishing poet. Several of his poems, most notably "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" and "The Double Dream of Spring," are touchstones of modern poetry; what astonishes now, as much as anything, is his great fertility as well as high quality. He has always been strongly influenced Wallace StevensDhis model for freedom from explicit meaningDand here Ashbery submits to Stevens's law that poetry "must give delight." This is one of his most pleasing collections in many years. Ashbery has mastered a tone at once melancholic and comedic, as in "What Is Written": "Dark spool,/ moving oceanward nowDwhat other fate could have been yours?/ You could have lived in a drawer/ for many years, imprisoned, a ward of the state. Now you are free/ to call the shots pretty much as they come./ Poor, bald thing." Not every reader grasps Ashbery's mixture of banal tone and language with surreal images and juxtapositions, but Ashbery is a great poet, and there are many delights in this new collection. Highly recommended.DGraham Christian, formerly with Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, MA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Having committed the torqued fantasies aroused by contemplation of the mysterious work of outsider artist Henry Darger to paper in Girls on the Run (1999), the prolific Ashbery returns to his own merry-go-round imaginative world in his twentieth poetry collection. In glissading lines of surreal imagery, bits of dialogue, and dreamlike scenarios rife with synesthetic metaphor, he writes in a persona that is sometimes bossy, sometimes wistful, often raving and devil-may-care, then tender, ribald, or sly. His poetic stand-ins sidle up and buttonhole the reader, talking rapidly about candy, storms, croquet, cocktails, a glacier, sex, landscapes, and animals. His titles hint at his rambunctious inventiveness: "Frogs and Gospels," "Full Tilt," "Here We Go Looby," "Amnesia Goes to the Ball," "Lemurs and Pharisees," "A Star Belched." As wild and arbitrary as these pell-mell performances feel, they are tightly constructed, rhythmic, and sinuous, and underlying their sparkle are musings on memory, time, loss, angst, and desire. Such seemingly free-associative work can be taxing; it can feel indulgent, and so Ashbery's giddy poems will please some readers and fatigue others. Bonnie Smothers
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Redeemed Area
Ashbery's writing with the crackle of someone just starting out. It's like now that he knows he's in the canon (thanks, Bloom), he can really go looby and make English swing. The autumn leaves fall a little lighter in these poems; reverie (always present) takes a back seat to inspired goofiness. I've admired other Ashbery books--this one I loved. It's made my own elite canon of bathroom reading and not a poem's let me down. I hope I grow old just like this.

Negative Capability
Aw nerts this guy is too much for me. I feel like one of the girls with names like Linda, Ruth, and Pat from the 1940s who stand next to an airplane when this poet comes along from the next century. "Your Name Here", the very title, suggests his "negative capability" is acting up again, with results typically mind-blowing, keeping everyone guessing. I rank this almost on the level of the great "Can You Hear, Bird."

Peremptory splendours abound
We've always been sleepily ardent in our admiration of John Ashbery, a boosterism which borders on a fanatical apathy: his perky atonality has a certain depressingly insistent gaiety about it. We value the kinky ecumenism between the patois and the mandarin, the somewhat dopey collision between the vernacular and the highfalutin. We can't wait until the biography comes out, along with its subject, so we can gain some insight into his methods.

We have here lyrics of a rehearsed suddenness, of a customary unpredictability: language whose smooth bumps and well-paved potholes inspire both fearer and farer, both reader and rider, to explore more deeply the simplistic intricacies of Ashbery's frabjously deadpan patois. The images collide in an amiable showdown, a triumphantly graceful slapstick, a dreadfully solemn opera bouffe, which we cannot readily forget. Herein we have the greeting and the greening of a life with all its happy calamities and soulshattering lucky breaks -- an ennui that is at least as jazzy as those halcyon ecstasies of yore, those drab celebrations of the past's disastrous victories.