One of the most significant poetic achievements of our time, John Ashbery's "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics' Circle Award upon its publication in 1976. The long...

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...

John Ashbery's new collection of fifty-one poems ends with the substantial piece that gives the book its title. Composed in stanzaic prose, it is a fine specimen of his distinctive courtship mode, wooing the language with language, teasing it and tea...

John Ashbery has been called "the finest poet in English of his generation" ("The Times"). A broad selection of Ashbery's prose writings from 1957 to 2004 is collected here for the first time. Literary reviews and essays, articles on film, and key pi...

For the first time, "The New York Poets" gathers in a single volume the best work of four extraordinary poets: Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler. By the early 1950s all four were settled in Manhattan, collaborating, competi...

"Chinese Whispers" is the title poem of this outstanding collection. It refers to the ways in which a single word or idea can mutate and evolve through repetition and replication to become something wondrous, strange and illuminating much like the br...

Everyone wants to subscribe to a deed of heroism, especially if the risks are largely imaginary. The headline announcing a daring deed; in the tourist shop a poster promising a spectacular, sun-drenched corrida, and there is a space between the legen...

"Little by little the idea of the true way returned to me", John Ashbery writes early in his new collection. Each sense is wakened up. So are all the spirits. Many whispers, voices chantant dans la coupole: passions, leaves, loves, flutes, insects, p...

During his career John Ashbery has been hailed as the "eminence grise" of postmodernism, championed by W. H. Auden and has carried off every major literary prize. His startling work alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) playful and recondite, af...

After John Ashbery's 216-page poem "Flow Chart" (1991) and the munificence of "Hotel Lautreamont" (1992) and "And the Stars were Shining" (1994), "Can You Hear, Bird" provides an A to Y of poems, moments in which voices, images and tones come in for...