Your Name Here: Poems - Hardcover

Ashbery, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374295980 ISBN 13: 9780374295981

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2000

Synopsis

A stunning new collection of poems by the award-winning poet and author of And the Stars Were Shining explores the themes of aging, childhood memories, and fantasy.

About this title

About the Author

John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927 and educated at Harvard and Columbia Universities. He is Charles P. Stevenson, Jr., Professor of Language and Literature at Bard College and lives in New York City and Hudson, New York.

Reviews

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.

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

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374295980
• ISBN 13: 9780374295981
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 127