The Anatolikon [Paperback]

John Ash (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 2000

Poetry. Originally from Manchester, England, John Ash currently lives in a small village outside Istanbul. In addition to being one of England's better-known poets, he is the author of one of the great travel books of our time, A Byzantine Journey (1995). In THE ANATOLIKON, Ash's deep knowledge of Byzantine and Ottoman cultures, as well as his daily life, informs poems that somehow still reflect his awareness of Western poetics and experimentation. Ash's poetry has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Paris Review.

Editorial Reviews

Review

2 Portraits: 1. Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar Higgins
2 Portraits: 2. Message (leyla Tiryakioglu)
Aunt Petka's Earrings
The Black Gondola
A Book Of Complaints
Bozuk Para
The Broken Steps
Desert Song
Elegy, Replica, Echo: In Memoriam John Griggs 1941-1991
Flute Music
Forgotten Orchestras: 1
Forgotten Orchestras: 2
Forgotten Orchestras: 3
Forgotten Orchestras: 4
Forgotten Orchestras: 5
Forgotten Orchestras: 6
Gabrielle's Balcony: 1
Gabrielle's Balcony: 2
Gabrielle's Balcony: 3
Gabrielle's Balcony: 4
Gabrielle's Balcony: 5
Gabrielle's Balcony: 6
Gabrielle's Balcony: 7
Gabrielle's Balcony: 8
Imbrogion
In Khorkum
Language Poem: 2000 Bc-2000 Ad
Mektup
The Names Of Kings
The Tour
Under Mount Anamas: 1
Under Mount Anamas: 2
Under Mount Anamas: 3
Under Mount Anamas: 4
Under Mount Anamas: 5
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

About the Author

John Ash (born June 29, 1948) is an expatriate British poet and writer. His lifelong interest in Byzantium (especially its architecture) is a major theme which runs through his poetry, fiction and travel writing, along with family friends and the three major cities he has lived in. As well as his books (largely published by Carcanet), his work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Village Voice, The Washington Post and Paris Review.

Product Details

• Paperback: 70 pages
• Publisher: Talisman House; 1st edition (December 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1584980109
• ISBN-13: 978-1584980100
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 7.4 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,128,371 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Smoke and Whispers, March 26, 2001

By 

Kevin Maynard (ST ALBANS, Hertfordshire United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Anatolikon (Hardcover)

Whatever John Ash gives the reader with one hand, he takes away with the other. Now you see him and now you don't. He enjoys subverting his readers' powers of comprehension. Every time you think you know what this poem is about, or where this anecdote is leading, he confounds your expectations and takes you somewhere else instead---and if many of his poems do start off by seeming anecdotal, the frame very quickly widens to take in whole continents and millennia in the space of just a few seemingly effortless lines. The Anatolikon is truly a 'Dictionary of Lost Things' (Mektup) and a travel guide to a country of Oblivion closely resembling Turkey---but at the same time resembling all those other strangely surrealistic but sensuous and colourful landscapes conjured up in his earlier books. One can safely say that none of them resembles Manchester, his city of origin: or then again perhaps they all do, a sort of anti-Manchester, exoticized by dreams of exile. All his poems share a preoccupation with history as fiction or history as evidence of death: the burnt pages are all around us: 'smoke and whispers' (Aunt Petka's Earrings) blown past us on the wind.

At times the formality of his language is reminiscent of Byzantine or Classical models; at other times he can seem as casual and demotic as O'Hara or Koch. Cavafy is a strong influence (The Names of Kings), but so is Ashbery (though the punning tribute of his own name has misled some readers into overemphasizing the magnitude of his debt).

Here is Ash the quintessential Imagist, deftly brushing in the poetry of plain statement with the bravado of a 'running grass' calligrapher: 'The Judas trees are over. / Their fallen purples smudge the paths. // The season of green plums arrives, / and perslane returns / to the restaurant tables.' But the next moment we encounter a florid Baudelairean fondness for classical apostrophe: 'O distances and ghosts! . . . / O the descent of the sun in places where forgotten names are written . . .'. Or maybe you're in the mood for personification, in the manner of Simic: 'Nothing comes to me- / a woman consisting / only of her veils, / colourless as water'.

Whenever you think him guilty of nostalgia, of sentimentalising the past, a touch of sardony agreeably sharpens the flavour of the poem: ' Perhaps it is all very simple. / Father, dear father, has come home / with a fine haul of slaves in his train, / and his children understand at once / how much easier their lives will be.'

Despite the obliquity of his chosen manner, he is never silly or nonsensical (his only 'Language Poem' is of course nothing of the sort---or else one can say that it much more truly a 'language poem' than any L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet could deliver: it is instead a poem about language travelling through time).

He is a major poet magnificently in control of his material, and at the peak of his powers. Read him and marvel.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Deep Poems From Mystic Anatolia, September 13, 2000

By 

Selçuk Altun (Istanbul Turkey) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Anatolikon (Paperback)

The elegant master of living British modern poets John Ash is living in Istanbul since 1996."The Anatolikon" is the output of his deeply satisfying individual poems concerning the place and the inhabitants of the mystic Anatolia(Asiatic part of Turkey) in Turkey.I have thoroughly enjoyed this slim volume of gripping poems like his earlier books.