The Mooring of Starting Out
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Carcanet Press Ltd
Published:27th Nov '97
Should be back in stock very soon
Published to mark the poet's 70th birthday.
To mark John Ashbery's 70th birthday, Carcanet publish his first five books of poems in a single volume: "The Tennis Court Oath" (1962); "Same Trees" (1956); "Rivers and Mountains" (1966); "The Double Dream of Spring" (1970); and "Three Poems" (1972).To mark John Ashbery's seventieth birthday, Carcanet publish his first five books of poems in a single volume. Much of this work has never been published in full in Britain, most of it -- apart from poems included in his 1985 Selected Poems -- has been unavailable for years. To have the full text of The Tennis Court Oath (1962) alongside Some Trees (1956, selected by W.H.Auden for the Yale Younger Poets series, described by Frank O'Hara as `the most beautiful first book to appear in America since Wallace Stevens' Harmonium), shows just how rapidly, and with what authority, Ashbery found his own way. Rivers and Mountains (1966), The Double Dream of Spring (1970, with which British readers first made his acquaintance a couple of years later) and Three Poems (1972), one of his most innovative works, complete what is in effect the Collected Early Poems.
'The Mooring of Starting Out is filled with illustrations glimpsed through luminous, funny, formidably intelligent and often heartbreaking poems.'
Andrew Zawacki, 'A wave of music,' Times Literary Supplement, 12 June, 1998
"The Mooring of Starting Out is filled with illustrations glimpsed through luminous, funny, formidably intelligent and often heartbreaking poems. Its pages should be cut, and re-read."
(Andrew Zawacki, Times Literary Supplement, 12th June 1998)
"Ashbery is that rare bird, a controversially great poet."
(David Herd, The Guardian, 24th July 1997)
"John Ashbery will be 70 next Monday. He will be feted in America as his country's greatest living poet, and will no doubt receive new accolades to add to his already impressive haul of prizes and fellowships. This is as it should be: just reward for the unrivalled grace and intelligence with which he has continued to handle the conflicting demands of the traditions in which he works and the contemporary audience for whom he writes."
(David Herd, The Guardian, 24th July 1997)
"Five decades on from his debut volume, Ashbery has become that impossible hybrid, an outlaw and a classic."
(David Herd, The Guardian, 24th July 1997)
"In a culture which expects the poet to know his or her place as a minor artist, Ashbery, writing at a Byronic pace, continues to insist on being heard. Ashbery has remained the poet of our moment because more than any contemporary he has stayed the poet of the here and now."
(David Herd, The Guardian, 24th July 1
ISBN: 9781857543667
Dimensions: 223mm x 141mm x 22mm
Weight: 663g
420 pages