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The Anatolikon

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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.

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.