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A01=John Ashbery
American
Author_John Ashbery
Category=DCF
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Product details

  • ISBN 9780856355479
  • Weight: 176g
  • Dimensions: 140 x 220mm
  • Publication Date: 01 Jan 1994
  • Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Paperback
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Over forty new poems in verse and prose make up A Wave, John Ashbery's tenth collection. The title poem is a twenty-page meditation on change, loss and adjustment; it is a major poem that takes place alongside 'Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror'and 'Litany' as a challenging masterwork of modern American poetry.
John Ashbery describes the way in which the rhythm of childhood memories permeates the verse of his long poem,'A Wave':
'Waves have always been somehow embedded in my mind because I spent a great deal of my childhood on the edge of one of the great lakes, Lake Ontario, where my grandparents lived. They're not as big as the ones on the ocean but they do get to be pretty big and you hear them all day long, and their rhythm is something that has always been with me and keeps erupting in the poetry.'
(talking to David Sexton, The Sunday Times, 16th June 1983)
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.

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