Customer Reviews

Planisphere: New Poems

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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?