![]() ![]() I especially like the final poem, poignantly reprising the last line of Keats' Ode to a Nightingale', "Do I wake or sleep?"' Sean O'Brien, Independent 'The lyrics in Breezeway, a new collection by the octogenarian poet John Ashbery are as good as his finest. It serves as a corrective to the monoglot provincialism by which the Anglophone world is still bedevilled. Ian Thomson, Financial Times The book invites the reader to poetic gluttony. ![]() ![]() ![]() 'Quick Question, with the hushed intensity of its music and great lyric beauty, could only be Ashbery.' 'A fine collection of poems rooted in 21st-century America.' The energy and modernity of his strange little worlds tell nothing of his age.' 'John Ashbery's final collection of poetry disguises itself well as a mid-career high. 'I'll keep returning to The Wave, knowing that each time I do, I'll connect with poems, and lines in poems, I haven't noticed before and recconect with those that have resonated already' Here language fizzes with a vital "off-kilter quality" and an Ashberian state of open-ended possibility.' 'This is an exciting missing piece of the jigsaw for Ashbery enthusiasts. This collection of unfinished works allows readers to tread that border as well.' Ashbery recognized the porous border between decision and delusion, between finality and its seeming appearance. Even as the references that undergird these projects range from the reassuringly familiar to the dauntingly obscure, as is typical with Ashbery, they characterize a rarefied mental atmosphere, one in which the poet's droll self-awareness deflates what otherwise might be pretension. Praise for John Ashbery 'That Ashbery had these several extended works underway simultaneously testifies not only to his unflagging fealty to the form but also to his extravagantly various powers of invention and intelligence. It is fitting that the major American poet since Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens should give us this noble version of the precursor of all three.' Guardian, 2011 'More than a century after Arthur Rimbaud composed his Illuminations they are reborn in John Ashbery's magnificent translation. Michael Glover, The Tablet One of the strongest, most exuberant and closely engaged translations of Rimbaud's work. Ian Thompson, The Spectator, Books of the Year It is always a pleasure to have the extraordinary poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, teenage prodigy and (in later life) gun-runner, rendered anew into English: this version of the late poem cycle Illuminations translated by the American poet John Ashbery, is vertiginous, exhilarating and mildly hallucinogenic. Rimbaud's most thouroughly modern masterpiece, Illuminations, is now translated by John Ashbury, who brilliantly captures the volume's dizzy-making, metropolitan imagery of subways, viaducts, raised canals and bridges. 'Absolute modernity is perhaps granted by this translation, published nearly a century after the original work, infusing the poems with a newfound modernity.Rimbaud's hallucinatory visions translated as poetry and prose is beautifully rendered by Ashbery who manages to transcend the limits of language.'Īrthur Rimbaud, the 19th-century French poet, was a ferocious malcontent, who free-wheeled towards self-destruction with the help of hashish and quantities of alcohol. ![]()
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