Breezeway

May 18, 2015
In the title poem of his latest collection, Ashbery (Quick Question), arguably the most highly lauded living American poet, writes, “We have to live out our precise experimentation./ Otherwise there’s no dying for anybody,/ no crisp rewards.” This volume continues Ashbery’s precise experiment—the particular, breezy conflagration of voices for which the poet has become so well known—and offers readers occasional pointed musings on mortality. It is a playfully obtuse collection; Ashbery’s ear catches idiosyncrasies of speech and literature and presents our many modes of language back to us. This method, when applied to our mortality and to the poet’s own, both charms and cuts: “We all have to fail/ at end of days,” he writes. Put another way, “We’re not gonna be here anymore.” Repetition, often a source of pleasure or grounding in poetry, is not to be found here, Ashbery’s voracious ear and familiar method are reliable: “Whatever we’re dealing with catches us/ in mid-reconsideration. It’s beautiful,/ my lord, just not made to be repeated,/ that’s all.” While it is difficult to bemoan a lack of urgency in the poems of an 88-year-old who has won every conceivable honor, this collection feels too comfortably Ashberian to light a real spark in its readers.

April 1, 2015

"There are good times in everybody's satchel" writes Ashbery in the opening piece of this new collection, and as his longtime readers have learned, each poem is itself a satchel bursting with "an abundance of samples," untethered scraps of mass culture, personal memory, and movie trivia colliding within the poet's confiding, conversational delivery ("Remember last month, when he was saying/ doomed lovers' syndrome uproots us all?"). The Kardashians, Druids, and Masterpiece Theater emerge only lines from one another, unanswerable questions abound ("What does Saturday feel like/ on Sunday?"), and who else but Ashbery would conjure a Hurricane Edsel? As always, his poems evoke the sound of a single voice engaged in simultaneous multiple conversations. VERDICT Though these poems seem more haltingly assembled, less fluid than those in earlier volumes, Ashbery remains an engaging trickster, still able to slip the occasional shrewd commentary ("Our networks will be joining you in progress") into the playfully distracting chaos.--Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY

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