Customer Reviews

Hotel Lautreamont

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Ashbery is, it may be argued, the most imaginative, creative, wonderfully empathetic, and worldly poets writing. He brings Keats' concepts of Negative Capability to bear on our experience with each other, our feelings and self consciousness, and the sneaky unconscious, that wears its mask in the darkest of places. Although many of these poems deal with themes full of darkness and deep weight, like the ocean fathoms, they are composed of moments of lightness, love, and sheer whimsy. The reader is always slightly out of place at the start or end of a poem, but it allows a kind of subtle fog to spread through the mind like faraway birds: "Where are you? Where you are is the one thing I love, / yet it always escapes me, like the leaves in their lilacs, / too busy for just one answer, one rejoinder." His visions are cemented with mortar and Elmer's glue from the dreams and lost loves that we notice in the subway of our sleep but which we must sacrifice for bread and tea. His poems rustle the dreams of our musing cities and make the metropolis of experience fall like orange trees. I can't come close to describing it. Ashbery is brilliant.
This book will shatter and repair your imagination like fog made of glass.

As daring as Ulysses Grant, as timorous as Tennyson, as bold as Beddoes, this imbroglio of tepid vignettes, this rebarbative hymnal of blithe spirituals, never ceases to fascinate the "hypocrite lecteur" -- until, of course, it does.

This intriguing, surreal book of poems does not deserve the nasty treatment dished out by the (until now) sole reviewer of this book. I was appalled not just by the mean-spirited nature of the review but also by how strikingly different my impression of Hotel Lautreamont is. It is as though we read two different books. Whatever grudge the earlier reviewer is obviously harboring toward Mr. Ashbery, please do not let this pedantic vocabulary fetishist deter you from a truly rewarding experience.

PS: The uninformed slur on General Grant is worthy of a duel!