Review by Booklist Review
Ashbery is covertly prophetic in his forecasts of new forms of crisis and folly, weaving prescience into the very meter of his always surprising, frolicking, knowing, and compassionate poems as he channels the increasingly discordant, digitized soundtrack of our lives. With the recent addition of the National Humanities Medal to his remarkable list of major awards, venerable, imaginative, and vital Ashbery, author of several dozen books, is nimble, funny, philosophical, and artistically adventurous in this zesty and substantial collection. He revels in colloquialisms and paradox and practices a provocative, remarkably fluent form of linguistic collage that echoes the perpetual churning of the mind. In brisk and disconcerting vignettes, witty and plangent riddles, sharp critiques of the absurdities we accept as reality, and adieus tossed off as the speaker flees the scene of some debacle, Ashbery addresses time, war, crime, tyranny, and toxicity with the rueful insouciance of those who passionately embrace life as the world burns. How sad that everything has to change, / yet what a relief, too! And then, Let it mean something. And so it does.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
When it comes to reviews, it's become as problematic to challenge Ashbery's work as to praise it. Part of the reason is that with every new Ashbery collection, we encounter moments of irreducible beauty-like when "tanks retreat/ as though the war was never meant/ and none of us were supposed to die as/ we in fact weren't"-alongside moments of cringe-worthy irony and cliche ("Don't try this at home" begins "Suburban Burma"). For a long time now the two have canceled each other out. And the elephant in the room, at least in the last 20 years, has been the question of whether Ashbery is leaning on his own style instead of continuing to push his boundaries as an artist. Here, for example, are a handful of titles from the collection, each of which banks on the double-entendre colloquialism that's been a staple of conservative poetry since the '90s: "Quick Question," "Feel Free," "Puff Piece," "Laundry List," "The Short Answer," "False Report," "Words to That Effect." On one hand, the genius of Ashbery's work is that it's always rippling and changing its colors: "Like a windup denture in a joke store/ fate approaches, leans quietly," he writes in "A Voice from the Fireplace." On the other hand, it stands to reason that constant change is itself a form of stasis. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Octogenarian Ashbery continues his informal reign as poet laureate of the multiverse, producing poems that channel an unimpeded flow of words that may or may not accumulate into sense. Any given line doesn't so much follow the one before it as replace it entirely, erasing the past, rendering all questions ("Would I lie to you?") and attempted answers moot. As always, the poet's affable, rhetorical ease lends an ersatz logic to his improvisations ("The drive down was smooth/ but after we arrived things started to go haywire") until we find ourselves caught in his signature torrents of comically surreal images ("Like a windup denture in a joke store/ fate approaches") and impenetrable aphorisms ("Better a silent/ accordion than a chorus of harps"). -VERDICT Governed by the dynamics of change and disappearance, Ashbery's career-long "impish narrative" may ultimately embody a Seinfeldian meta-poetry about nothing, but both veteran and novice Ashbery readers will discover moments of epiphany amid the apparent chaos of this collection.-Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NYÅ (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
