Customer Reviews

Wakefulness: Poems

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Here you will find the body and mind of the post-modern world
unfolding before your eyes, with all its pleasures, its anxieties, its lost dreams, its hopes. It is the world we know, because it is already in us, part of us--it is always arriving, always arrived. But, there is more. Ashbery, through unique images and juxtapositions, brings into the open a world not quite satisfied with itself, sometimes too satisfied--in a state of suspended satisfaction, sometimes leading to nausea. It is a world looking for experiences under every log and at every corner, only to find the rates of exchange rising and the necessity for experiences increasing. It is a world placed smack dap in the impossibility of its own being. What we have in "Wakefulness" is the journey of many selves through many worlds, many doors, all leading back to a haunting singularity of space and time. One gets the uncanning feeling in each poem that one has been there before, or even that one, if only momentarily, exists only in and through the words that appear on the page. This is what poetry should be. There are echoes of all the greats here, from the English romantics, to Dickinson and Stevens and beyond. But, Ashbery knows how to tame these echoes, how to humour them, disinheret them, and reclaim them for his own purposes, making these poems fully his own. I highly recommend this book and any other Ashbery books.

This is a beautiful book and a number of poems in it are at the pinnacle of Ashbery's achievement. There is a musicality in some of these poems that is sometimes lacking in some of Ashbery's longer, more prose-like works. A number of these poems are breathtakingly beautiful. In parts there is a sad undertone of loss and mournfulness, which adds to the poems' detached beauty.

If you have read "Chinese Whispers" and "Your Name Here," then "Wakefulness" is kind of the first part of that set. "Wakefulness" has its surprising slopes that only Ashbery can give us but there is also a distant cohesiveness to it that an Ashbery follower can pick up. I often try to think of a way to describe what an Ashbery poem is like as if I was explaining it to someone who might cringe at the difficulty Ashbery presents us. These poems are like a light sleep in front of the tv where commercials and sitcoms sprinkle an already watery dream: the real mixes with the dreamed real. None of these poems, and not many of Ashbery's poems, are barreling down on the reader in a straight line. Everything is smoke in a fan. Once one can step inside Ashbery's voice, then there is a comfortablity in the chaos, as there is inside our heads.

A marvelous collection. The quote on the inner cover (by Harold Bloom) says it all "The book is a profound pleasure, the gift of a master."