A Wave
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Carcanet Press Ltd
Published:1st Jan '94
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Over forty new poems in verse and prose make up A Wave, John Ashbery's tenth collection. The title poem is a twenty-page meditation on change, loss and adjustment; it is a major poem that takes place alongside 'Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror'and 'Litany' as a challenging masterwork of modern American poetry.
John Ashbery describes the way in which the rhythm of childhood memories permeates the verse of his long poem,'A Wave':
'Waves have always been somehow embedded in my mind because I spent a great deal of my childhood on the edge of one of the great lakes, Lake Ontario, where my grandparents lived. They're not as big as the ones on the ocean but they do get to be pretty big and you hear them all day long, and their rhythm is something that has always been with me and keeps erupting in the poetry.'
(talking to David Sexton, The Sunday Times, 16th June 1983)
"John Ashbery's A Wave expresses with painful recognisability the apartness, impermanence and incoherence of individual existence today, and yet produces exuberant script for survival."
(Marina Warner, The Sunday Times, 9th December 1984)
"light-footed and delectably irresponsible."
(Alfred Brendel, The Sunday Times, 9th December 1984)
"In A Wave Ashbery re-makes the strangeness of experience on a large scale and simultaneously invites the reader to look at it without evasion. The blind man will not see everything perhaps, but he may contemplate the experience as it is occurring in the poem. This opening into contemplation is as restorative an effect as any that poetry can bring about. For it to work only attention and awareness are needed. As always Ashbery is an available, even popular poet."
(Peter Hainsworth, The Times Literary Supplement, 21st December 1984))
"He recalls Stevens and Eliot, and the continuity of French poetry from Baudelaire to Surrealism...Ashbery may be the last nineteenth century Symbolist."
(Geoffrey Ward, The Cambridge Quarterly, 14th February 1985)
ISBN: 9780856355479
Dimensions: 220mm x 140mm x 5mm
Weight: 176g
90 pages