Can You Hear, Bird
Regular price
€19.99
20th Century
A01=John Ashbery
American
Author_John Ashbery
Category=DCF
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
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eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
LGBTQ+
Product details
- ISBN 9781857542240
- Weight: 245g
- Dimensions: 135 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 29 Feb 1996
- Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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After John Ashbery's 216-page poem Flow Chart (1991) and the munificence of Hotel Lautréamont (1992) and And the Stars were Shining (1994), Can You Hear, Bird provides an A to Y of poems, moments in which voices, images and tones come in for Ashbery's wily attentions. The poems are generally short. But when we get to T, 'Tuesday Evening' occurs. Tuesday evenings are long in Ashbery's America. This Tuesday 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 abundance of impulse and reflection. An ars poetica seems to emerge:
An alphabet is forming words. We who watch them
never imagine pronouncing them, and another opportunity
is missed. You must be awake to catch them —
them, and the scent they give off with impunity.
We all tagged along, and in the end there was nothing
to see — nothing and a lot. A lot in terms of contour, texture,
world. That sort of thing. The real fun and its clothing
An alphabet is forming words. We who watch them
never imagine pronouncing them, and another opportunity
is missed. You must be awake to catch them —
them, and the scent they give off with impunity.
We all tagged along, and in the end there was nothing
to see — nothing and a lot. A lot in terms of contour, texture,
world. That sort of thing. The real fun and its clothing
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.
