And the Stars Were Shining
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Carcanet Press Ltd
Published:21st Apr '94
Should be back in stock very soon
After the `monstrous, magnificent sprawl' of John Ashbery's 216-page poem Flow Chart (1991) and the further munificence of Hotel Lautreamont (1992), his sixteenth collection, And the Stars were Shining, includes a thirteen-part title poem which is a major achievement in American poetry, with the wise wit and heartbreak of Ashbery's urbane, unsettle imagination, subject to time's encroachments and the vagaries of the human heart.
`He is quite simply,' The Times said, `the finest poet in English of his generation,' a generation that includes his friends Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler and Kenneth Koch, as well as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. He moves tradition forward with a deceptively casual style. Language is `a landscape sweeping out from us to disappear on the horizon', into which he moves with assurance, without fixed direction, finding a way.
And the Stars were Shining includes fifty-nine poems marked by the valiant comedy and lyric intensity we have come to expect of Ashbery.
"Ashbury's central subject, the nature and value of imagination, is a crucial one. In his creation of highly mandarin work in a voice which is startlingly and ravishingly contemporary, he has done something with few parallels. This very difficult book gives great pleasure, once we accept that the intellect may find its gratifications tantalizingly deferred."
(Lachlan Mackinnon, The Independent, 23rd July 1994)
"As with other long poems before it ('The Skaters', 'Fragment', 'Litany'), 'And the Stars Were Shining'would seem to have carried Ashbery's poetry into genuinely new fields of inquiry, and it deserves a most generous welcome."
(David Herd, The Times Literary Supplement, 6th January 1995)
ISBN: 9781857540666
Dimensions: 216mm x 138mm x 7mm
Weight: 167g
220 pages