Books by John Ashbery

A landmark gathering of the first three decades of work by America's preeminent living poet.

An intimate and unique collection of the work of John Ashbery-a prolific poet and art critic-pairing poetry and art writings with playlists of music from his personal library.This book places poetry by Ashbery (1927-2017), gathered from his later collections, in conversation with a selection of contemporaneous art writing. In addition, as Ashbery loved music and listened to it while writing, the "playlists" here present samplings of music from these same years, culled from his own library of recordings. Ashbery's poetry is frequently described as ekphrastic, though, rather than writing a poem "based on" or "inspired" by the content of an artwork or piece of music, he engages with how the experience of seeing it and the artistic strategies employed offer ways of thinking about it and through it. Many observations from Ashbery's art writing also provide keys to how we might read his poetry. Many recordings he listened to feature contemporary classical works that emphasize complex textures, disparate sounds, and disjunct phrases. Ashbery's poetry similarly plays with a diversity of poetic textures and sudden turns such that a reader might construct multiple narratives or pathways of meaning. He rarely offers linear stories or focuses on evocative descriptions of a scene or object. In exploring this ekphrastic book project, the reader is invited to discover how, for Ashbery, these three forms might illuminate and inform one another. In Mónica de la Torre's introduction, she explores the connection between the three muses of music, art, and poetry, and the ekphrastic experience of reading Ashbery.

Collects five long, serial poems which the American master John Ashbery left unfinished.

For over 50 years John Ashbery has been one of America's most innovative and influential poets. Like Yeats and Milosz, Ashbery is that rare poet whose work continues to improve as he ages. Now at 85, he writes with the boldness and vision of a poet half his age. Honed by experience and inexhaustibly creative, these never before published poems certify that Ashbery's artistic flame has continued to burn late into his life.

A capsule of the imaginative life of the individual, Some Trees is the 52nd volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Comparing him to T. S. Eliot, Stephanie Burt writes that Ashbery is "the last figure whom half of the English-language poets alive thought a great model, and the other half thought incomprehensible." After the publication of Some Trees, selecting judge W. H. Auden famously confessed that he didn't understand a word of it. Most reviews were negative. But in this first book of poems from one of the century's most important poets, one finds the seeds of Ashbery's oeuvre, including the influence of French surrealists--many of whom he translated--and abstract expressionism.

Passions, leaves, loves, flutes, insects, paintings, apologies, and partings, all feature in this collection of poetry by Pulitzer Prize-winning author, John Ashbery.

The denizens of Kelton, New York - a bedroom community some fifty miles from Manhattan - are a well-heeled bunch who spend an awful lot of time playing rummy. There is Alice, an unfulfilled cellist, and her complacent brother Marshall, who doesn't like his friends to confide in him. There are the bumbling and overindulged Fabia and Victor, another sibling duo, and their friend Irving, a meek mama's boy. Into their cloistered lives come Claire and Nadia Tosti, two sisters from Paris, whose take-charge tactics stir the winds of enterprise, romance, and change. Through them, Alice is led to a swarthy Italian who helps her orchestrate a successful restaurant business. Irving pairs up with Claire, finally winning freedom from his eccentric, cat-loving mother. Victor embraces Nadia and the antiques trade, while Fabia discovers a potential romance with Victor's French pen pal. Only Marshall finds himself eluded by love, a predicament that will lead him from the snug environs of Kelton to the crude energies of the Midwest. In bistros, galleries, bars, and theaters, the protagonists eat, drink, criticize each other, and debate the worlds of art, music, literature, life, and love.

A book of poems by the world's celebrated poet.

During his career John Ashbery has been hailed as the "eminence grise" of postmodernism, championed by W.H. Auden and has carried off every major literary prize. Drawn from the work he published up to 1984, this collection makes a wide range of this poet's writing available.