Planisphere - Softcover

Ashbery, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 006191522X ISBN 13: 9780061915222

Publisher: Ecco Press, 2019

Synopsis

"Ashbery is a national treasure."
--New York Times Book Review

The poetry of John Ashbery has been awarded virtually every conceivable literary prize including the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Planisphere is a new collection by one of America's most innovative and influential poets--an exceptional artist whose work stands alongside the finest of Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, and Hart Crane. For more than half a century Ashbery has been producing timeless works such as Chinese Whispers, Hotel Lautréamont, A Wave, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, and Where Shall I Wander. Planisphere is proof that the master only improves with age.

About this title

Review:

"Deeply pleasurable...Ashbery still has his ear to the ground, he's still listening, and the results are fun, funny, often wise, sometimes brilliant..."--BookForum

" [Ashbery's] productivity has done nothing to diminish his legendary inscrutability, not sap his notorious zest for playing havoc with nearly every convention and fixed idea about poetry under the sun."--Boston Globe

"Ashbery helms a keen awareness of himself throughout...If he's repetitive, it's in the way that a beach is repetitive with sand, or the night sky is repetitive with stars."--Boston Phoenix

From the Back Cover:

Breathlike

Just as the day could use another hour,
I need another idea. Not a concept
or a slogan. Something more like a rut
made thousands of years ago by one of the first
wheels as it rolled along. It never came back
to see what it had done, and the rut
just stayed there, not thinking of itself
or calling attention to itself in any way.
Sun baked it. Water stood, or rather sat
in it. Wind covered it with dust, then blew it
away. Always it was available to itself
when it wished to be, which wasn't often.

Then there was a cup and ball theory
I told you about. A lot of people had left the coast.
Squirt conditions obtained. I forgot I overwhelmed you
once upon a time, between everybody's sound sleep
and waking afterward, trying to piece together
what had happened. The rut glimmered
through centuries of snow and after.
I suppose it was trying to make some point
but we never found out about that,
having come to know each other years later
when our interest in zoning had revived again.

About this edition

• Publisher: Ecco Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 006191522X
• ISBN 13: 9780061915222
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160