John Ashbery's first published book of poems, handpicked from the slush pile by none other than W. H. AudenAshbery's Some Trees narrowly beat out a manuscript by fellow New York poet Frank O'Hara to win the renowned Yale Series of Younger Poets prize in 1955—after the book had been rejected in an early screening round. Competition judge W. H. Auden was perhaps the first to note, in his original preface to Some Trees, the meditative polyphony that d...

From one of our most important modern poets comes an essential early collection, including the famous long poems "The Skaters" and "Clepsydra"When Rivers and Mountains was published in 1966, American poetry was in a state of radical redefinition, with John Ashbery recognized as one of the leading voices in the New York School of poets. Ashbery himself had just returned to America from ten years abroad working as an art critic in France, and Rivers and M...

A bold, striking new collection of poems from one of America's most influential and inventive poets.With more than twenty poetry collections to his name, John Ashbery is one of our most agile, philosophically complex, and visionary poets. In Breezeway, Ashbery's powers of observation are at their most astute; his insight at its most penetrating. Demonstrating his extraordinary command of language and his ability to move fluidly and elegantly between wide-ranging thoughts and ideas—...

A captivating experiment in traditional poetic form, from one of the most untraditional American poets ever to set pen to paperAt first glance, John Ashbery's Shadow Train 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...

A crackling, moving new collection from one of America's greatest living poets.In over twenty-six original books, the poems of John Ashbery have long served as signposts guiding us through the delights, woes, hypocrisies, and uncertainties of living in the modern world. With language harvested from everyday speech, fragments of pop culture, objects and figures borrowed from art and literature, his work makes light out of darkness, playing with tone and style to show how even the se...

One of Ashbery's most acclaimed and beloved collections since Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, filled with his signature wit and generous intelligenceThe poems in John Ashbery's award-winning 1984 collection A Wave address the impermanence of language, the nature of mortality, and the fluidity of consciousness—matters of life and death that in other hands might run the risk of sentimentality. For John Ashbery, however, these considerations provide...

A 1995 collection of poems that finds John Ashbery at his most conversational, funny, and surprisingIn Can You Hear, Bird, John Ashbery's seventeenth collection, language is both a plaything and a sandbox. The poems are arranged not in the order of their composition but alphabetically, by the first letter in their titles, like the neatly arrayed keys of some fabulous Seussical instrument. In line after line, Ashbery demonstrates his alertness to language as...

In Ashbery's 1987 collection, ballads, folklore, and fairy tales mesh with the anxieties and idioms of modern lifeFor a book by one of the leading avant-garde poets of modern literature, John Ashbery's April Galleons is suffused with voices from the past. There are echoes of the Romantics in the elegiac "A Mood of Quiet Beauty" and "Vetiver," allusions to ballads and folkloric epics in "Finnish Rhapsody" and "Forgotten Song," and veiled references to legend...

John Ashbery's restless, witty meditation on aging and the music of change: A must-read collection from America's greatest modern poetThe child's game Chinese Whispers, known in America as Telephone, is an exercise in transforming the recognizable into something beautifully strange. John Ashbery's twenty-fourth collection of poems, Chinese Whispers, re-creates in every line the accidentally transformative logic of the language game for which the book is nam...

A collection of poems that recall, in their powerful transformations of language, the moment of clarity that arrives upon waking from a dreamOne of John Ashbery's most critically acclaimed collections since his iconic works of the mid-1970s, Wakefulness was praised in 1999 for its beauty and alertness. In these pages, the great poet is at once luring the reader into a vivid dream and waking us up with a jolt of recognition. In poems such as "The Village of ...

Is poetry the act of putting something together, or the art of taking something apart? Houseboat Days, one of John Ashbery's most celebrated collections, offers its own answerRemarkable for its introspection and for the response it elicited when it was first published in 1977, Houseboat Days is Ashbery's much-discussed follow-up to his 1975 masterpiece Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, and remains one of his most studied books to date....

Witty yet heartbreaking, conversational yet richly lyrical, John Ashbery's sixteenth poetry collection showcases a mastery uniquely his ownAnd the Stars Were Shining originally appeared in 1994, toward the midpoint of a startlingly creative period in Ashbery's long career, during which the great American poet published no fewer than nine books in ten years. The collection brings together more than fifty compact, jewellike, intensely felt poems, including th...