A Wave by John Ashbery

A Wave by John Ashbery

Over forty new poems in verse and prose make up A Wave, John Ashbery's tenth collection. The title poem is a twenty-page meditation on change, loss and adjustment; it is a major poem that takes place alongside 'Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror'and 'Litany' as a challenging masterwork of modern American poetry.
John Ashbery describes the way in which the rhythm of childhood memories permeates the verse of his long poem,'A Wave':
'Waves have always been somehow embedded in my mind because I spent a great deal of my childhood on the edge of one of the great lakes, Lake Ontario, where my grandparents lived. They're not as big as the ones on the ocean but they do get to be pretty big and you hear them all day long, and their rhythm is something that has always been with me and keeps erupting in the poetry.'
(talking to David Sexton, The Sunday Times, 16th June 1983)

"'Recklessness, ' John Ashbery once observed, 'is what makes experimental art beautiful' Ashbery ... might have had his own formidably original poetry in mind, for a policy of calculated recklessness is central to his artistry. Ashbery's latest collection characteristically throws caution to the winds in pursuit of things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme. The results are exhilarating. To top it off, the 21-page title poem is easily Ashbery's finest single achievement since "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror won the Pulitzer Prize and vaulted him into national prominence. Ashbery's poems defy paraphrase... Some of Ashbery's more solemn explicators miss--or undervalue--the strong element of humor in his work. There's a streak of sublime silliness in ["A Wave]."--David Lehman, "Newsweek "The charm of Ashbery's urbane style--so various, so beautiful, so new--persists throughout "A Wave, and will induce the rereadings the poems demand. It is a style that resists, in its glowing reflectiveness, the approaching darkness of the cimmerian moment."--Helen Vendler, "The New York Review of Books "In his eleventh major collection and especially in its long title poem, [Ashbery] has placed the vast prose vistas of "Three Poems within the lyric measures he realized most explicitly in "Houseboat Days. In retrospect, it seems an inevitable triumph; and the trio of "Three Poems, "Houseboat Days, and "A Wave will probably be seen by his audience as the indispensable core of Ashbery's work."--Douglas Crase, "The Nation "Splendidly diverse ... [a] superb and heartbreaking collection."--David St. John, "The Washington Post Book World

John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. His books of poetry include Breezeway; Quick Question; Planisphere; Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems, which was awarded the 2008 International Griffin Poetry Prize; 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, in 2011 he received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, and in 2012 he received a National Humanities Medal, presented by President Obama at the White House. He lived in New York until his death, aged ninety, in 2017.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780856355479
ISBN 10	085635547X
Title	A Wave
Author	John Ashbery
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Carcanet Press Ltd
Year published	1994-01-01
Number of pages	90
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.