John Ashbery's new collection speaks from the haunted, ambiguous cities of the twenty-first century. These are the landscapes of the worldly country we have created, both ominous and absurd. Perspectives dissolve into dazzle. The clock is ticking: we are on the wrong set and the cameras are rolling. Ashbery's supple, vigorous idiom conjures an unpredictable world, astonished by moments of piercing directness: the pause to share a winter pear, the sudden apprehension that the places we left fallow "will be cultivated by another". "A Worldly Country" tells us where we are, now exhilarating, now vertiginous; full of heartbreak and (as always with Ashbery) full of every kind of mirth, from the most sombre to the most enchanted.
About the Author
John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. He has published more than twenty collections of poetry, beginning in 1953 with "Turandot and Other Poems". In 1976, "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" won the Pulitzer, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award. His art writings are collected in "Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957-1987" (Carcanet, 1990) and his literary essays appear in the "Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Other Traditions" (Harvard University Press, 2000), and in "Selected Prose" (Carcanet, 2004). Widely honoured internationally, he is the recipient of the Robert Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Horst Bienek Prize for Poetry from theBavarian Academy of Fine Arts (Munich), the Antonio Feltrinelli International Prize for Poetry from the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (Rome), and the Grand Prix des Biennales Internationales de Poesie (Brussels), all given for lifetime achievement. In 2002 he was named Officier of the Legion d'Honneur of the Republic of France. In 2012 he was awarded a National Humanities Medal, presented to him by President Obama at the White House. His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages.
Reviews
"Wallace Stevens once remarked that while we possess the great poems of heaven and hell, the great poems of the earth remain to be written. Ashbery is writing those poems" – Boston Review
"Stemming in part from Mallarme and in part from Whitman, Ashbery's work creates a tension in which the fine networks of linguistic reverie are balanced by the strong sense of American tradition" – Peter Ackroyd, Times Literary Supplement
"This is what real achievement in a contemporary poet consists of: he has laid down guidelines and made his mark on the language of the tribe" – John Bayley, New York Review of Books
