Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
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."Ashbury's central subject, the nature and value of imagination, is a crucial one. In his creation of highly mandarin work in a voice which is startlingly and ravishingly contemporary, he has done something with few parallels. This very difficult book gives great pleasure, once we accept that the intellect may find its gratifications tantalizingly deferred."<br />
(Lachlan Mackinnon, The Independent, 23rd July 1994)<br />
"As with other long poems before it ('The Skaters', 'Fragment', 'Litany'), 'And the Stars Were Shining'would seem to have carried Ashbery's poetry into genuinely new fields of inquiry, and it deserves a most generous welcome."<br />
(David Herd, The Times Literary Supplement, 6th January 1995)
`He is quite simply,' The Times said, `the finest poet in English of his generation,' a generation that includes his friends Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler and Kenneth Koch, as well as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. He moves tradition forward with a deceptively casual style. Language is `a landscape sweeping out from us to disappear on the horizon', into which he moves with assurance, without fixed direction, finding a way.
And the Stars were Shining includes fifty-nine poems marked by the valiant comedy and lyric intensity we have come to expect of Ashbery.
except
clasp, unclasp the hand that never is ours,
much as it wants to be? Under a gray skylight
the eclipse burns still, there are lilies, perfection
arrives, and then the tines
unearth fewer embers. Can it be time to go?
from Local Time