Selected Poems

Description

Selections from the first three decades of the poetry of John Ashbery, author of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award

The late John Ashbery was a poet whose “teasing, delicate, soulful lines made him one of the most influential figures of late-20th and early 21st century American literature.” (The New York Times)  This important volume gathers work from his first ten collections of poetry, from Some Trees, which was chosen by W.H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series (1956), to A Wave (1984). The 138 poems in this volume include short lyrics, haikus, prose poems, and many of Ashbery’s major long poems, including “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” offering a beautiful distillation of the first thirty years of his remarkable, groundbreaking work.John Ashbery: Selected PoemsFrom Some Trees
Two Scenes
Popular Songs
The Instruction Manual
The Grapevine
A Boy
Glazunoviana
The Picture of Little J. A. in a Prospect of Flowers
Sonnet
The Young Son
Errors
Illustration
Some Trees
The Painter
And You Know
He
A Long Novel
The Pied Piper
Le Livre est sur la table

From The Tennis Court Oath
Thoughts of a Young Girl
“How Much Longer Will I Be Able to Inhabit the . . .”
White Roses
Our Youth
An Additional Poem
Faust
A Last World
From The New Realism

From Rivers and Mountains
Rivers and Mountains
Last Month
If the Birds Knew
Into the Dusk-Charged Air
The Ecclesiast
The Recent Past
A Blessing in Disguise
Clepsydra
From The Skaters

From The Double Dream of Spring
The Task
Spring Day
Plainness in Diversity
Soonest Mended
Summer
It Was Raining in the Capital
Variations, Calypso and Fugue on a Theme of Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Song
Decoy
For John Clare
Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape
Parergon
Some Words
The Bungalows
The Chateau Hardware
Sortes Vergilianae

From Three Poems
The System

From Self-Portrait In a Convex Mirror
As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat
Worsening Situation
Forties Flick
As You Came from the Holy Land
Scheherazade
Grand Galop
Hop o’ My Thumb
Mixed Feelings
Märchenbilder
Oleum Misericordiae
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

From Houseboat Days
Street Musicians
The Other Tradition
Variant
Wooden Buildings
Pyrography
The Gazing Grain
Unctuous Platitudes
The Couple in the Next Room
Business Personals
Crazy Weather
On the Towpath
Bird’s-Eye View of the Tool and Die Co.
Wet Casements
Saying It to Keep It from Happening
Daffy Duck in Hollywood
Houseboat Days
The Lament upon the Waters
And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name
What Is Poetry
And Others, Vaguer Presences
The Wrong Kind of Insurance
Friends
The Ice-Cream Wars
Blue Sonata
Syringa
from Fantasia on “The Nut-Brown Maid”

From As We Know
From Litany
Silhouette
Many Wagons Ago
As We Know
Otherwise
Flowering Death
Haunted Landscape
My Erotic Double
Train Rising out of the Sea
Late Echo
And I’d Love You to Be in It
Tapestry
A Love Poem
This Configuration
Their Day
A Tone Poem
The Other Cindy
The Plural of “Jack-in-the-Box”

From Shadow Train
The Pursuit of Happiness
Punishing the Myth
Paradoxes and Oxymorons
Another Chain Letter
The Ivory Tower
At the Inn
The Absence of a Noble Presence
Qualm
Here Everything Is Stilll Floating
Some Old Tires
Something Similar
Or in My Throat
Untilted
The Leasing of September
Unusual Precautions
We Hesitate
Frontispiece
The Vegetarians

From A Wave
At North Farm
The Songs We Know Best
Landscape (After Baudelaire)
Just Walking Around
The Ongoing Story
Thank You for Not Cooperating
More Pleasant Adventures
Purists Will Object
37 Haiku
The Lonedale Operator
Darlene’s Hospital
Whatever It Is, Wherever You Are
A Wave

Index

“Contains Ashbery’s greatest work and confirms his position as one of America’s finest poets since Wallace Stevens.” —Edward Guerschi, Newsday

“Mr. Ashbery remains one of his generation’s most gifted and eloquent poets . . . He writes persuasively—and movingly—of the poetic process, of the attempts of the artist to wring order out of chaos.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“No other poet is as daring . . . None inhabits such a Versailles of the imagination. This formidable new volume offers the finest of his oeuvre.” —Carolyn Forche, Vanity Fair John Ashbery (1927 – 2017) was the author of more than twenty-five collections of poetry, including Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award;  Selected Poems (1985); and Selected Later Poems (2007), which was awarded the 2008 International Griffin Poetry Prize. Ashbery’s honors included a MacArthur Fellowship and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Foundation in 2011.US

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