3.5
Shadow Train
ByPublisher Description
At first glance, John Ashbery's
seems to embrace the constraints of traditional poetic form—but closer reading reveals that this work is Ashbery at his revolutionary best. In fifty poems, each consisting solely of four connected quatrains, Ashbery apparently plays by the rules while simultaneously violating every single one. Over and over again, the familiar, almost sonnet-like sixteen-line form creates an outline of a poem within which, one would expect, poetry is meant to arrive—as a station waits for a train. And yet, as with many of the world's greatest poems, the act of creating poetry also relies on the reading and the reader—in other words, as this collection's signature poem "Paradoxes and Oxymorons" puts it, "the poem is / you."
In
, Ashbery demonstrates how language influences our experience of reality, creating it and sustaining it while also remaining mysterious and ineffable: constantly arriving, but impossible to catch.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesShadow Train Reviews
3.5
“john ashbery is one of my most favourite poets because he challenges me and my sensibility as a (very poor) reader of poetry. i still don't know how to read his poems because his poems don't continue with the poetic feeling that it started with. but, i believe that one has to be meditative to enter into the poetic universe of ashbery, but if you're familiar with american life, then you might find it very easy to get his poems and feel the atmosphere that he's created.
i read one of his books of poems this year ("a worldly country"), and it was one of the best poetry books i have ever read. so, when i pick this up, i had the same expectations (also because i love ashbery). but, i found reading this book very draining. each poems consist of four stanzas of four long lines. perhaps, it's an experiment from his side. i don't know, i have only read two of his books of poems. however, this book was deeply meditative of the details that ashbery provides with his poetic depth. ashbery writes about our ennui, and in this ennui, we miss appreciating the little beauties of our lives and our being alive. reading his poems is like a train halting at each stations, and your journey only finishes when the train stops at the last station where you have to get down. still, it was hard for me to grasp his poems completely.”
“Against what departure? Even a departure from the normal?
So we are not recognized, under the metal. But to him
The love was a solid object, like a partly unpacked trunk,
As it was then, which is different now when remembered.”
About John Ashbery
's latest book of poems is
. From 1960 to 1965, he was the
art critic and
Paris correspondent. France has named him Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres and Officier of the Légion d'Honneur. He has received a National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and President Obama awarded him a National Humanities Medal.
and
's latest poetry book is
They have edited Ashbery's essays in
and in
, as well as his translations of Pierre Martory. She teaches at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy; he is the director of writing at Pace University.
Other books by John Ashbery
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