Where Shall I Wander:new Poems [Hardcover]

This 23rd collection from Harold Bloom's favorite living American poet is a modestly scaled affair: it doesn't end with a grand long poem, which has become an Ashbery trademark since Rivers and Mountains, nor is it especially big like Can You Hear, Bird nor does it even contain many poems that extend more than three pages (the title poem, at seven pages, is the longest). The book as a whole takes the pleasures of games and makes of them poetic seductions; the adjective "Ashberian"—part Joseph Cornell, part Henry James, part Close Encounters—is perhaps the only one possible to describe the work at this point: "Another's narrative supplants the crawling/ stock-market quotes. Like all good things/ life tends to go on too long.../ Rains bathe the rainbow,/ and the shape of night is an empty cylinder,/ focused at us, urging its noncompliance/ closer along the way we chose to go." Perhaps his secret is in providing us with the experience of terrible encounter in the comfort of our own poem, one that we can choose to occupy for years, even after discovering the beating heart under the floorboards. (Mar. 1)
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Ashbery expresses a sly playfulness, a tender theatricality, a surreal sensibility, and an urbane wit. With more than 20 poetry collections to his name, this master of the humorous meditation, this maestro of scintillating streams of consciousness, this perpetuator of the Wallace Stevens' school of philosophical reflection and manicured whimsy frolics in language as though words are flowers and each page is an exotic arrangement. For Ashbery, language is both artifice and life. His new poems are especially sharp, arch, and complexly moody. Rife with allusions to literature and art, they swing teasingly between the vernacular and the rarefied as Ashbery contrasts the more gracious past with the pressing present even as he mocks nostalgia. His characters (his poems are skits, fables, journal entries, and monologues) are full of longing and ruefulness as they reveal and conceal their feelings, performing parlor tricks of the soul to assuage their bruised hearts and fear of age and death. Mercurial, elegant, funny, and magical, these mind-bending and beautifully haunting poems are the knowing work of a virtuoso. Donna Seaman
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You meant more than life to me. I livedthrough you not knowing, not knowing Iwas 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 itupset a chair. Many times to celebratewe were called together and wherewe 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 leave that there.-- from "The New Higher"

John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. He is the author of more than twenty books of poetry, including Chinese Whispers; Your Name Here; Can You Hear, Bird; And the Stars Were Shining; Hotel Lautréamont; Flow Chart; Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award; and Some Trees, which was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series. Ashbery is Charles P. Stevenson, Jr., Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College. He lives in New York.