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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Poetic abstraction - a dazzling dawn, or sound without sense?,
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This review is from: Some Trees (The American poetry series ; v. 14) (Paperback)
His best book? Before he abandoned metre. (Tellingly, the one that tentatively abandons metre is titled Chaos.)When he still affected archaic diction - mockingly? affectionately? but winningly - while often eschewing sense. One could wish for more rhyme, too. That beggar to whom you gave no cent Striped the night with his strange descant The tender lyricism of And You Know and The Instruction Manual is irresistable; the glowing narrative of Illustration (I) leaves us wanting more (Ashbery the narrative poet manqué!) At times (Two Scenes, The Thinnest Shadow) he out-Audens Auden - one can quite see why Auden picked him, as he did, in preference to Frank O'Hara - though sometimes the apparent arbitrariness inherent in semi-'automatic' writing can give one pause. Snow 'dropping its fine regrets' might as well have been 'egrets', the purely descriptive in preference to a lazy instance of the pathetic fallacy (when did snow ever say sorry?). But possibly irony is intended; the register wavers between the lyrical and the selfconsciously precious, or having one's cake and eating it. Ashbery uses language sensually, to be sure, but we meet some telltale adjectives: etiolated; rarefied; fastidious. 'Reticence' would be another key; it occurs in the title poem. An exquisite, cunningly-wrought pantoum should by rights have gained the collection that 5th star (we're talking 1956, after all!) but I just wanted to say 'Steady on..' However, with Big John you can always guarantee an exciting, if sometimes frustrating ride. Beneath the patrician veneer - what? Baneful Posterity will lumber on stage soon enough and with a wave consign 9/10 of human endeavour to oblivion; from where we stand, though, these poems cannot be said to have aged one iota
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