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Planisphere: New Poems
 
 
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Planisphere: New Poems [Hardcover]

John Ashbery (Author)
3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

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Book Description

December 1, 2009

Breathlike

Just as the day could use another hour,
I need another idea. Not a concept
or a slogan. Something more like a rut
made thousands of years ago by one of the first
wheels as it rolled along. It never came back
to see what it had done, and the rut
just stayed there, not thinking of itself
or calling attention to itself in any way.
Sun baked it. Water stood, or rather sat
in it. Wind covered it with dust, then blew it
away. Always it was available to itself
when it wished to be, which wasn't often.

Then there was a cup and ball theory
I told you about. A lot of people had left the coast.
Squirt conditions obtained. I forgot I overwhelmed you
once upon a time, between everybody's sound sleep
and waking afterward, trying to piece together
what had happened. The rut glimmered
through centuries of snow and after.
I suppose it was trying to make some point
but we never found out about that,
having come to know each other years later
when our interest in zoning had revived again.


Frequently Bought Together

Customers buy this book with Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror: Poems (Poets, Penguin) $15.91

Planisphere: New Poems + Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror: Poems (Poets, Penguin)
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  • Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror: Poems (Poets, Penguin)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. What can one say about a new book by John Ashbery (Notes from the Air)? That Ashbery is as prolific in his 80s as ever? Yes, there are 99 new poems, sequenced alphabetically and most of them a page long, in this book. That his wit is still sharp, the poems still rife with clever juxtapositions and colliding voices? Absolutely. That he still culls from the highs and lows of culture, making for unlikely yet somehow inevitable meetings? Of course: I'm barely twenty six, have been on Oprah/ and such, he says in a poem that also asks, thinking of mortality as he has been of late, The song that started/ in the middle, did that close down too? That perhaps Ashbery has learned a thing or two from his own legions of imitators and acolytes? That's harder to prove, but almost certainly true (note the hip and lovely cover by poet/designer Jeff Clark). That, as in his last several books, there's nothing entirely new , but that the poems are almost always satisfying and strange? Indeed. And that, perhaps most surprising, depending on one's biases, this, Ashbery's 28th volume of poems, ranks among the most vital collections of the year. Or maybe that's not a surprise at all. (Dec.)
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Review

“Deeply pleasurable...Ashbery still has his ear to the ground, he’s still listening, and the results are fun, funny, often wise, sometimes brilliant...” (BookForum )

” [Ashbery’s] productivity has done nothing to diminish his legendary inscrutability, not sap his notorious zest for playing havoc with nearly every convention and fixed idea about poetry under the sun.” (Boston Globe )

“Ashbery helms a keen awareness of himself throughout...If he’s repetitive, it’s in the way that a beach is repetitive with sand, or the night sky is repetitive with stars.” (Boston Phoenix )

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 160 pages
  • Publisher: Ecco; 1 edition (December 1, 2009)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0061915211
  • ISBN-13: 978-0061915215
  • Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 0.7 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #988,958 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

2 Reviews
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4 star:
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Average Customer Review
3.5 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars An Old Favorite, January 14, 2010
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This review is from: Planisphere: New Poems (Hardcover)
People seem to either like Ashbery or they don't like him. I like him. Once again Ashbery has chosen a title that beautifully captures the whole formal enterprise of the collection. A planisphere is a map of half or more of the celestial sphere with a device for indicating the part of a given location visible at a given time, or a representation of the whole or a part of a sphere on a plane. Face it, poems are like that. There is no such thing as a poem alone. All poems are connected to other poems in an unending chain, like stars in the sky. Ashbery's poetry reveals this clearly. His poems are sovereign objects, beautiful discrete things in themselves. And yet, because of the way they are constructed, they call out to the wider world of discourse. The poems do not speak for the world of discourse, any more than the world (a part of it,this review, for example) speaks for the poems; a poem is not a bridge between two worlds. A poem evokes a parallel being, which we may call a reading, and this reading asserts its own sovereignty, leaving the way for a third text, then a fourth and fifth and so on. This is also true of writers as well as readers of poetry. One star is inconceivable, as is one poem, even though we wish upon a star, and we have our favorite poems.

Everyone knows that any poet has a limited repertoire. Having a favorite is like preferring one version of a familiar tune over another: 'Oh, that is one of Dickinson's finest performances!' I gave "Planisphere" four rather than five stars only because I like some of his other books such as "Hotel Lautreamont", "The Double Dream of Spring" and "Three Poems" better.
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2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Impressed & puzzled, March 25, 2010
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Planisphere: New Poems (Hardcover)
I was quite impressed by Ashbery's wit and use of language. I was puzzled by what a good bit of it meant, but maybe it should just be and not mean? A very strange book. And, by the way, what does that number 3160 on the cover indicate, if anything?
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