About this ebook
One of Ashbery’s most acclaimed and beloved collections since Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, filled with his signature wit and generous intelligence
The 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 an opportunity to display his prodigious poetic gifts: the unerring ear for our evolving modern language and its ever-expanding universe of meanings, the fierce eye trained on glimmers underwater, and the wry humor that runs through observations both surprising and familiar. As the poem “The Path to the White Moon” has it, “We know what is coming, that we are moving / Dangerously and gracefully / Toward the resolution of time / Blurred but alive with many separate meanings / Inside this conversation.” The long title poem of A Wave, which closes the book, is considered one of Ashbery’s most distinguished works, praised by critic Helen Vendler for its “genius for a free and accurate American rendition of very elusive inner feelings, and especially for transitive states between feelings.”
Winner of both the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the Bollingen Prize, this book is one to be read, reread, and remembered.
The 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 an opportunity to display his prodigious poetic gifts: the unerring ear for our evolving modern language and its ever-expanding universe of meanings, the fierce eye trained on glimmers underwater, and the wry humor that runs through observations both surprising and familiar. As the poem “The Path to the White Moon” has it, “We know what is coming, that we are moving / Dangerously and gracefully / Toward the resolution of time / Blurred but alive with many separate meanings / Inside this conversation.” The long title poem of A Wave, which closes the book, is considered one of Ashbery’s most distinguished works, praised by critic Helen Vendler for its “genius for a free and accurate American rendition of very elusive inner feelings, and especially for transitive states between feelings.”
Winner of both the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the Bollingen Prize, this book is one to be read, reread, and remembered.
About the author
John Ashbery was born in 1927 in Rochester, New York, and grew up on a farm near Lake Ontario. He authored more than thirty books of poetry, fiction, drama, and criticism, his work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages, and he won numerous American literary awards for his poetry, including a MacArthur Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and a National Humanities Medal. His book Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. For many years, Ashbery taught graduate and undergraduate poetry courses at Brooklyn College and Bard College, and his most recent book of poems is Quick Question, published in 2012.
Rate this ebook
Tell us what you think.
Reading information
Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.
