Quick Question: New Poems - Hardcover

Ashbery, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0062225952 ISBN 13: 9780062225955

Publisher: Ecco, 2012

Synopsis

Hailed by Harold Bloom as "America’s greatest living poet," John Ashbery has won every major American literary award for his poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. A beloved and gifted artist, Ashbery takes his place beside Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, and Hart Crane in the canon of great American poets. With Quick Question, a new collection of poems published in time for his 85th birthday, John Ashbery proves that his creative power has only grown stronger with age.

About this title

About the Author

John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. He wrote more than twenty books of poetry, including Quick Question; Planisphere; Notes from the Air; A Worldly Country; Where Shall I Wander; and Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. The winner of many prizes and awards, both nationally and internationally, he received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation in 2011 and a National Humanities Medal, presented by President Obama at the White House, in 2012. Ashbery died in September 2017 at the age of ninety.

From the Back Cover

For over 50 years John Ashbery has been one of America's most innovative and influential poets. Like Yeats and Milosz, Ashbery is that rare poet whose work continues to improve as he ages. Now at 85, he writes with the boldness and vision of a poet half his age. Honed by experience and inexhaustibly creative, these never before published poems certify that Ashbery's artistic flame has continued to burn late into his life.

Reviews

Ashbery is covertly prophetic in his forecasts of new forms of crisis and folly, weaving prescience into the very meter of his always surprising, frolicking, knowing, and compassionate poems as he channels the increasingly discordant, digitized soundtrack of our lives. With the recent addition of the National Humanities Medal to his remarkable list of major awards, venerable, imaginative, and vital Ashbery, author of several dozen books, is nimble, funny, philosophical, and artistically adventurous in this zesty and substantial collection. He revels in colloquialisms and paradox and practices a provocative, remarkably fluent form of linguistic collage that echoes the perpetual churning of the mind. In brisk and disconcerting vignettes, witty and plangent riddles, sharp critiques of the absurdities we accept as reality, and adieus tossed off as the speaker flees the scene of some debacle, Ashbery addresses time, war, crime, tyranny, and toxicity with the rueful insouciance of those who passionately embrace life as the world burns. “How sad that everything has to change, / yet what a relief, too!” And then, “Let it mean something.” And so it does. --Donna Seaman

Edition details

• Publisher: Ecco
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0062225952
• ISBN 13: 9780062225955
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128