Synopses & Reviews
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.
Synopsis
It's Clear at the end of the twentieth century that John Ashbery is one of the most important American poets writing today. The Mooting of Starting Out demonstrates his early bravado and extraordinary development as a poet over the first twenty years of his poetic career, beginning with his stunning debut collection, Some Trees, which W. H. Auden chose in 1956 to be published in the Yale Younger Poets Series. This extraordinary volume juxtaposes what has been called Ashbery's most accessible book, The Double Dream of Spring (0970), with the highly idiosyncratic and much admired prose poetry of Three Poems (1972). Along with The Tennis Court Oath and Rivers and Mountains, which was nominated for a National Book Award in 1967, these are the books that brought Ashbery's brilliant star into focus.
Synopsis
An extraordinary introduction to the poetry of John Ashbery, perhaps America's most important international poet-winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
About the Author
John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. He earned degrees from Harvard and Columbia, and went to France as a Fulbright Scholar in 1955, living there for much of the next decade. His many collections include Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems (2007), which was awarded the International Gri=n Poetry Prize. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) won the three major American prizes—the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award—and an early book, Some Trees (1956), was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series. The Library of America published the first volume of his collected poems in 2008. Active in various areas of the arts throughout his career, he has served as executive editor of Art News and as art critic for New York magazine and Newsweek. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1988 to 1999. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships and was a MacArthur Fellow from 1985 to 1990. His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages. He lives in New York.