Where Shall I Wander

Description

John Ashbery's new collection of fifty-one poems ends with the substantial piece that gives the book its title. Composed in stanzaic prose, it is a fine specimen of his distinctive courtship mode, wooing the language with language, teasing it and teasing out of it a Protean lover that loves Protean him back: a you, an I, in a wild variety of registers and postures. Throughout "Where Shall I Wander" the effable and ineffable are in dialogue; time ('then' and 'now') and the stable moments of the poem are within earshot of one another, but cannot ever quite touch hands. There are ghosts and presences, some unexpected like Ali Baba, Arabia Deserta (down to the turning spit and braised goat) and Mrs Hanratty's apron; others like Holderlin are more insistently entertained, in a poetry that fractures and reinvents syntax, cadence and our sense of beauty, this tribute informed by the terror of Holderlin's later world in which it is impossible not to share.

JOHN ASHBERY was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. He is the author of twenty books of poetry, many available from Carcanet. Widely honoured internationally, in Europe he has received the Horst Bienek Prize from the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts (Munich), the Antonio Feltrinelli International Prize from the Academia Nazionale dei Lincei (Rome), and the Grand Prix de Biennales Internationales de Poesie (Brussels), all for lifetime achievement. He has produced twenty-one volumes of poetry and received the Pulitzer Prize for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror in 1977. In 2002 he was named Officier of the Legion d'Honneur of the Republic of France.

'Among the poets of the New York School, Ashbery has been the most influential in opening up new possibilities for the American lyric.' Helen Vendler, New Republic, 25th February 2005. '...vintage Ashbery. The ease and the seeming casualness of the voice works in direct opposition to the complexity of the message.' - The Economist, March 2005.