John Ashbery

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror: Poems

John Ashbery

• 1976 NBA–Poetry winner
• 1976 Pulitzer–Poetry winner
• Score: 20.26

John Ashbery won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Ashbery reaffirms the poetic powers that have made him such an outstanding figure in contemporary literature. This new book continues his astonishing explorations of places where no one has ever been.

Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems

John Ashbery

• 2008 Griffin International winner
• Score: 10.58

While Ashbery has long been considered a powerful force in twentieth-century culture, Notes from the Air demonstrates clearly how important and relevant his writing continues to be, well into the twenty-first century. Many of the books from which these poems are drawn are regularly taught in university classrooms across the country, and critics and scholars vigorously debate his newest works as well as his classics. He has already published four major books since the turn of the new millennium, and, although 2007 marks his eightieth birthday, this legendary literary figure continues to write fresh, new, and vibrant poetry that remains as stimulating, provocative, and controversial as ever.

Notes from the Air reveals, for the first time in one volume, the remarkable evolution of Ashbery’s poetry from the mid-1980s into the new century, and offers an irresistible sampling of some of the finest work by this “national treasure.”

A Wave: Poems

John Ashbery

• 1985 Lenore Marshall winner
• Score: 10.35

First published in 1984 and now appearing in a new edition, A Wave is widely considered one of Ashbery’s finest books of poetry. The 44 pieces collected here—particularly the long title-poem—find the poet applying his uniquely lyric, meditative, and often hilarious sensibility to the mysterious and incessant curves and crests of love, art, thought, experience, and selfhood.

Where Shall I Wander: New Poems

John Ashbery

• 2005 NBA–Poetry finalist
• Score: 6.55

You meant more than life to me. I lived
through you not knowing, not knowing I
was living.
I learned that you called for me. I came to
where you were living, up a stair. There
was no one there.
No one to appreciate me. The legality of it
upset a chair. Many times to celebrate
we were called together and where
we had been there was nothing there,
nothing that is anywhere. We passed
obliquely,
leaving no stare. When the sun was done
muttering,
in an optimistic way, it was time to…

 

Hotel Lautreamont

John Ashbery

• 1993 Pulitzer–Poetry finalist
• Score: 6.43

Readers of John Ashbery’s recent book Flow Chart will find the continuation of its spirit, at once tragic and playful, dense and volatile, passionate and impersonal, in this extraordinary new collection of lyric poems. The title Hotel Lautreamont alludes to the pseudonymous Count de Lautreamont, a nineteenth-century poet remembered for his presurrealist epic prose poem, “The Songs of Maldoror”. Little is known about him, save that his real name was Isidore Ducasse and that he spent his brief adult life in various hotels in Paris, checking out of his…