Product Description
Ashbery fans will welcome this collection of one hundred and twelve poems where the signature qualities of Ashbery's greatest work are on every page with a new intensity and power.
Amazon.com Review
Of this excellent work, MarjoriePerloff writes: "Literary echoes, puns, paragrams, andmini-narratives collide so as to create the image of a world burstingwith memories and overflowing with possibilities--a world like no oneelse's." John Ashbery, long admired for his wit, craft, andassured (if sometimes bewildered) tone, has outdone himselfhere. Notice especially the tour de force, "Eternity Sings theBlues." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Can You Hear, Bird: Poems by John Ashbery
Fabulous poems, esp the oft-quoted "Obedience School."
Found book at Barnes and Noble, but much less expensive ordering same thru Amazon. ... Read more

Product Description
After John Ashberry's "Flow Chart" (1991), "Hotel Lautreamont" (1992) and "And the Stars were Shining" (1994), this work provides an A-Y of poems, moments in which voices, images and tones come in for his attention. The poems are generally short, except for "T" when "Tuesday Evening" occurs. The poem begins in tight rhymed quatrains; as the evening extends, the verse relaxes to elicit and swallow up more and more, until only rhyme pins together the impulse and reflection. Ashberry's imagination remains subject to time's encroachment and the heart's vagaries. Ashberry was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award for "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" (1975). ... Read more

Product Description
This book examines the function of repetition in the work of Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery. All three poets extensively employ and comment upon the effects of repetition, yet represent three distinct poetics, considerably removed from one another in stylistic and historical terms. At the same time, the three are engaged in a very interesting relation to each other, a relation readers tend to explain in terms of repetition, by positing Whitman and Stevens as the two alternative 'beginnings' out of which Ashbery emerges. Krystyna Mazur analyses the work of the three poets to discern patterns which may operate across a relatively broad spectrum of examples, as well as to consider the variety of ways in which repetition can structure a poetic text. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Make your point already...
I am a senior English major at the University of Vermont and at first I was surprised to think that that this book might be a bit over my head. I now see that Mazur is simply horrible at logically conveying her very complicated literary opinions.She also just might be too smart for her own good, but she should still be able to make a coherent point. Mazur continually runs the reader in circles with her overly complicated sentence structures and writing style, and worse, she never really makes concrete conclusions to follow her already incomplete theses.

Here is an appropriate analogy to put Krystyna Mazur in a nutshell: She is like that kid that sits in the front row of class, thinks he's super smart...and so he talks a lot. The first few days you listen to him, because it sounds somewhat good and seems to know what he's talking about. But then the more you listen, the more it becomes apparent that even though he has a seemingly impressive vocabulary, he never actually says anything meaningful. Then you begin to wonder if he is even using these words you've never heard correctly. Eventually it gets to the point where every time that kid speaks in class, I roll my eyes and try not to groan out loud.

Hope this helps. ... Read more

Product Description
An architectural gallery of the city of Hudson featuring antique maps and more than 200 photographs, most dating from 1850 to 1930. The city of Hudson, founded in 1783, has been called "a dictionary of American architecture design" because of its many 18th and 19th-century buildings that have survived to the present day. From an unlikely, but very successful, whaling and merchant seaport 120 miles from the sea, to a boom-and-bust factory town, and then to a depressed and failing city with a frontier reputation for prostitution, gambling, and official corruption, the city of Hudson, New York, founded on the shores of the upper Hudson River by New England Quakers in 1783, has recently blossomed into a vibrant antiques and arts center with a national reputation.

Through these cultural and economic ups and downs, much of the city's remarkable architectural legacy somehow survived the plagues of the centuries, making Hudson today "a dictionary of American architecture." As remarkable as the survival of so many of Hudson's 18th and 19th-century buildings, is the survival of a magnificent collection of photographs intimately documenting the city from the 1850s to the 1920s, published herein for the first time. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Good browsing, good reading
A thoroughly entertaining account of a Hudson River city with a truly fascinating history. I recommend it to anyone interested in nineteenth-century America, American architecture, especially the vernacular architecture of the northeast, and America as it once was. The vintage photographs are wonderful!

NYCUES
This is/was a great book and it is beautifully writtenI have spent many weekends and summers in this area of the hudson valley. This book brought to life, the colorful past of this wonderful city.

Could have been so much better...
The old photos are the best part, but everything else, especially the quality of the printing & the total lameness of the writing is inexcusable. A very sad exercise in vanity publishing. ... Read more

Product Description
Many contemporary critics have been interested in Martin Heidegger's phenomenology and have recognized its importance for literary theory. As a continuation of theoretical explorations, this study undertakes a discussion of poetic visions of reality in the works of contemporary hyper-realistic poets, Czeslaw Milosz and John Ashbery. It breaks new ground by applying the key Heideggerian terms, Dasein, space, time, and culture to explore the reality created by and/or alluded to in the contemporary poetry of Milosz and Ashbery. In its final synthesis, the study proposes the comprehensive concept of ontological transcendence as a model to analyze multidimensional contemporary poetry. ... Read more

Product Description
'Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror'was the first of John Ashbery's books to be published in Britain by Carcanet, and this is its third printing. Since it originally appeared here in 1977, three further collections have followed: 'As We Know', 'Shadow Train' and 'A Wave'. 'Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror'was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award and the National Book Critics' Circle Award. The long title poem, a meditation on Parmigianino's famous self-portrait, has become Ashbery's best-known poem. It is accompanied here by a number of shorter pieces - playful, witty, elusive. ... Read more

Product Description
I got kind of frenzied after the waiting
had stopped, but now am cool as a suburban garden
in some lost city. When it came time for my speech
I could think of nothing, of course.
I gave a little talk about the onion - how its flavor
inspires us, its shape informs our architecture.
There were so many other things I wanted to say, too,
but, dandified, I couldn't strut,
couldn't sit down for all the spit and polish.
Now it's your turn to say something about the wall
in the garden. It can be anything.
- from "Terminal"

In his twentieth collection, John Ashbery continues to examine the themes that have preoccupied him of late: age and its inevitable losses, memories of childhood, the transforming magic of dreams in daily living. Your Name Here offers souvenirs to readers, inviting them to "personalize" the poems with their own associations and memories. Ashbery's masterful voice is heard with renewed vigor and poigancy in these beautiful poems.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Redeemed Area
Ashbery's writing with the crackle of someone just starting out. It's like now that he knows he's in the canon (thanks, Bloom), he can really go looby and make English swing. The autumn leaves fall a little lighter in these poems; reverie (always present) takes a back seat to inspired goofiness. I've admired other Ashbery books--this one I loved. It's made my own elite canon of bathroom reading and not a poem's let me down. I hope I grow old just like this.

Peremptory splendours abound
We've always been sleepily ardent in our admiration of John Ashbery, a boosterism which borders on a fanatical apathy: his perky atonality has a certain depressingly insistent gaiety about it. We value the kinky ecumenism between the patois and the mandarin, the somewhat dopey collision between the vernacular and the highfalutin. We can't wait until the biography comes out, along with its subject, so we can gain some insight into his methods.

We have here lyrics of a rehearsed suddenness, of a customary unpredictability: language whose smooth bumps and well-paved potholes inspire both fearer and farer, both reader and rider, to explore more deeply the simplistic intricacies of Ashbery's frabjously deadpan patois. The images collide in an amiable showdown, a triumphantly graceful slapstick, a dreadfully solemn opera bouffe, which we cannot readily forget. Herein we have the greeting and the greening of a life with all its happy calamities and soulshattering lucky breaks -- an ennui that is at least as jazzy as those halcyon ecstasies of yore, those drab celebrations of the past's disastrous victories.

Negative Capability
Aw nerts this guy is too much for me. I feel like one of the girls with names like Linda, Ruth, and Pat from the 1940s who stand next to an airplane when this poet comes along from the next century. "Your Name Here", the very title, suggests his "negative capability" is acting up again, with results typically mind-blowing, keeping everyone guessing. I rank this almost on the level of the great "Can You Hear, Bird."

Not his best
I disagree with the review below.

Flow Chart was a bore.

His best work recently is in "Can You Here, Bird" and a few books around that time.

His last two, including this one, seem lacking (though this new one has a handful of very good ones).

But if you dig Ashbery, pick it up anyway and see if you disagree. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Fairfield Porter by Fairfield Porter
Gives an good overview of the artist's paintings and thoughts. The images are good, but unfortunatelly some of them are in black and white.

A useful catalogue of the artist's work
This a very slim but large, almost square format publication, was published to accompany an exhibition of Porter's work in Boston 1983 and travelling elsewhere to conclude in New York in 1984. It opens with an introduction to the man Fairfield Porter, followed by an essay discussing his devolvement as an artist and what influenced him. This is followed by Jottings from a Diary, comments by John Bernard Myers. The main text concludes with a conversation between the artist and Paul Cummings. The book concludes with a detailed chronology, a comprehensive bibliography, and a list of the works exhibited.

The book is illustrated throughout with full page plates, mostly in full colour but still with several in black and white. The reproductions are good, and convey the sense of light apparent in the artist's work, and the large square format of the book allows most of them to be reproduced at a good size. What comes across very clearly is the subtle simplicity of Porter's painting, and his sensitive and economic drawing of the human figure.

While I have no quibble with the reproduction of the paintings, I do find the presentation of the text leaves much to be desired. Set in an oversized Pica like font with two unjustified columns to the page, massive paragraph spacing and too much white space evenly distributed, it has an amateurish appearance.

In the apparent absence of any other realistically available publications illustrating Porter's work this is a very useful publication.
... Read more

Product Description
Critics, scholars, students, and other readers of contemporary poetry have long appreciated Ashbery's uncanny mastery of the cadence and lyricism of colloquial speech, but they have been less sensitive to the equally important influences in his work of such "outsider" French poets as Arthur Rimbaud, Raymond Roussel, and Isidore Ducasse (a/k/a Count de Lautréamont). These sometimes overlooked presences are wonderfully alive in this collection of lyric poems, which first appeared in 1992. Now back in print, Hotel Lautréamont underscores Ashbery's ability to be both tragic and playful, dense and volatile, passionate and impersonal. As David Herd observed in New Statesman and Society, this is "a poetry fully and startlingly engaged with the way things happen."
... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Ashbery Deserves Better
This intriguing, surreal book of poems does not deserve the nasty treatment dished out by the (until now) sole reviewer of this book.I was appalled not just by the mean-spirited nature of the review but also by how strikingly different my impression of Hotel Lautreamont is.It is as though we read two different books.Whatever grudge the earlier reviewer is obviously harboring toward Mr. Ashbery, please do not let this pedantic vocabulary fetishist deter you from a truly rewarding experience.

PS:The uninformed slur on General Grant is worthy of a duel!

Yes
As daring as Ulysses Grant, as timorous as Tennyson, as bold as Beddoes, this imbroglio of tepid vignettes, this rebarbative hymnal of blithe spirituals, never ceases to fascinate the "hypocrite lecteur" -- until, of course, it does. ... Read more

Product Description
There are curved stories here, intrigues and quests whose exuberance of plot and sense of farcical immersion in the world of appearances is rendered with a light touch and a sure command of tone, staging the conflict between the mind's drift and the "inflexible etiquette" of form (Gerard Manley Hopkins's "soft sift / In an hourglass"). The making of these condensed dramas is often the unmaking of the person speaking, whose "frets and fresh starts" reveal an original sensibility concerned not with self-display but with a general comedy of wrong moves. Intrepid, cross-pollinated, oblique, Mark Ford has been called an American Philip Larkin and an English John Ashbery, but in fact he is like no one else, and only occasionally like himself. ... Read more

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