Nearly a decade ago, I reviewed John Ashbery's "Selected Poems." The poet, then in his late 50s, had published 10 volumes of verse and had won a Pulitzer and a National Book Award. I wrote that the publication of "Selected Poems" was a "celebration of full maturity" and Mr. Ashbery was "a major poet at the peak of his powers."
It turns out that I was wrong -- he had not yet begun to "peak." Now surveying the range of John Ashbery's achievement, I believe his peak shines somewhere in the mists of his 1987 "April Galleons" (that most beautifully named of books), in the book-length poem "Flow Chart" (1991) or the volume in hand, "And the Stars Were Shining."
To his readers, the themes of this new work will be familiar: mutability, the sadness of solitude and loss, the enduring hope of renewal by rediscovering a world through language. The best poems engage all these themes.
What can we do,
except
clasp, unclasp the hand that never is ours
much as it wants to be? Under a gray skylight
the eclipse burns still, there are lilies, perfection
arrives, and then the tines
unearth fewer embers. Can it be time to go?
from "Local Time"
This poem evokes the moment when one body eclipses another in an erotic encounter, with all of its excitement and frustration.
you reminded me of dragonflies skulking,
of aromatic fires peaking,
and neither of us gets to know the other.
Next thing you know it's winter.
The skylight, now aproned with white,
is our bare harvest.
Story resumes. But the chill does not last. The lover recovers his content in solitude after the "eclipse."
But there is good in reappearing:
the flames roar, beaker of scotch, the old way
things were probably supposed to be all along anyway.
The tone of the speaker in Mr. Ashbery's poems has always been distinguished by its delicacy and humility. A poet of high seriousness, he never takes himself too seriously; he never shouts, complains, or lectures except in fun: And if what others do/ finally seems good to you? Why,/ the very civility that gilded it/ is flaking. At times the tone seems almost frail, asexual, etiolated. Then only humor and irony can keep it fresh.
Yet in this new book one finds a greater firmness of tone, as if the poet had steeled himself against the ravages of time: Originally/ we weren't going to leave home. But made bold/ somehow by the rain we put our best foot forward./ Now it's years after that. It/ isn't possible to be young anymore./ Yet the tree treats me like a brute friend;/my own shoes have scarred the walk I've taken.
It will not be news to followers of Mr. Ashbery's career that critics call him a romantic poet in the tradition of Shelley, Coleridge and Wallace Stevens. He is "romantic" in a sense confined to literary discussion -- that is, his poetry always is seen to emerge from a musical field of pre-conscious or semi-articulate language. Classical poetry clearly expresses what is understood; romantic poetry expresses the struggle to come to an understanding, to salvage meaning from chaos.
Such objects as my endurance picks out
like a searchlight have gone the extra mile
too, like schoolchildren, and are seated now
in attentive rows, waiting trimly
for these words to flood
distraught corners of silences. We collected
them after all for their unique
indifference to each other and to the circus
that houses us all, and for their collectibility --
7+ that, and their tendency to fall apart.
"Ghost Riders of the Moon"
The "objects" sitting like schoolchildren are the subjects of the poet's musing. The poems that preserve the objects will keep them from falling apart -- here we have a new variation on the theme of ars longa, vita brevis, emphasizing the need for poetry as an antidote to chaos.
A few poems such as "Title Search" and "William Byrd" float free of logic, narrative or any unifying principle other than musicality. Some of these "collages" are charming, some are impish -- all serve to provide perspective for the passages of clear meaning that shine the more brightly against a background of mist and darkness.
The most memorable poems follow, with satirical quirkiness, the conventions of discourse, narrative and argumentation. Not since e.e. cummings have we seen a lyric poet who can elicit so much meaning from conventional rhetoric while making a mockery of it. "O Oswald, O Spengler, this is very sad to find!" Thus he echoes Robert Browning's famous opening to "A Tocatta of Galuppi's," at the beginning of his own poem "The Decline of the West."
What! Our culture in its dotage!
Yet this very poem refutes it,
springing up out of the collective unconscious
like a weasel through a grating.
The poem is an elegant, humorous put-down of Spengler's theories: His book, I saw it somewhere and I bought it./ I never read it for it seemed too long./ His theory though, I fought it/ though it spritzes my song . . .
In a narrative poem titled "Well, Yes, Actually," Mr. Ashbery tells the story of a high-school dropout who one day looks into his old classroom. He overhears his teacher blessing students, the good and the bad, and he yearns to return. The teacher, thinking that the dropout may have been "the genuine article" wonders where she went wrong, lamenting: These are the apples of my crying,/ she says, the ones they never brought me, and I,/ I am too distressed to dream.
It is, of course, a dreadful fate in the universe of Mr. Ashbery's poetry to be "too distressed to dream." In a piece called "The Improvement" he writes: I want the openness/ of the dream turned inside out, exploded/ into pieces of meaning by its own unasked questions,/ beyond the calculations of heaven. And in one of the most moving poems in the book, "Like A Sentence" he sadly muses on the human condition: though we came to life as to a school, we must leave it without graduating.
Images of the teacher and the student run all through this provocative collection, as two functions of the individual psyche; learning is sacred, and dreaming is an essential part of the process.
Mr. Epstein's sixth collection of poetry, "The Boy in the Well," will be published next year. He lives in Baltimore.
Title: "And the Stars Were Shining"
Author: John Ashbery
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Length, price: 100 pages, $18