The Mooring Of Starting Out: The First Five Books of Poetry - Softcover

Ashbery, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0880015470 ISBN 13: 9780880015479

Publisher: Ecco, 1997

Synopsis

Most critics would agree that John Ashbery is one of 20th-century American poetry's finest voices. Perhaps his most admired book is Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, a culmination of themes, styles, and forms with which the poet experimented over the course of two decades. Now, the poet's devoted readers can trace his development through the first five books of his poetry, collected here in one handy volume. The Mooring of Starting Out represents Ashbery's work from 1956 through 1972, comprising Some Trees, his first book; The Tennis Court Oath, written while he was living in Paris.

About this title

About the Author:

John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. He wrote more than twenty books of poetry, including Quick Question; Planisphere; Notes from the Air; A Worldly Country; Where Shall I Wander; and Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. The winner of many prizes and awards, both nationally and internationally, he received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation in 2011 and a National Humanities Medal, presented by President Obama at the White House, in 2012. Ashbery died in September 2017 at the age of ninety.

Review:

"His poetry appeals not because it offers wisdom in a packaged form, but because the elusiveness and mysterious promise of his lines remind us that we always have a future and a condition of meaningfulness to start out toward. This book of beginnings takes us back to the mooring of John Ashbery's starting out, 'that day so long ago.' It contains a poetry whose beauties are endless."-- "New York Times Book Review""Ashbery's poems do not evade the real; they deny it the power to prevent other realities from being conceived."-- Paul Gray, "Time""This is the best possible introduction to the brilliant, difficult, and beautiful work of this poet."-- "Publishers Weekly""No one writing poems in the English language is likelier than Ashbery to survive the severe judgments of time.... He is joining that American sequence that includes Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, and Hart Crane."-- "Harold Bloom""The chances are very good that [Ashbery] will come to dominate the last third of this century as Yeats dominated the first."-- "Poetry"

About this edition

• Publisher: Ecco
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0880015470
• ISBN 13: 9780880015479
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 389