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And the Stars Were Shining

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Product Description

John Ashbery's penchant for the long, discursively philosophic poem has sometimes served to distract critical attention from his mastery of intensely conceived short lyrics.

We all have a favourite Ashbery flavour, and mine is the gin-fizz dynamic at work in the relative brevity displayed by the best of the shorter poems gathered in this collection. In fact, I would argue that you would have to go back to Houseboat Days (1977), to find a comparable success in terms of Ashbery's ability to compress poetic experience into an accommodatingly resonant tension-field. With Ashbery's method there is always the danger that expansiveness contributes to fluctuating air-pockets in the poem's flight-path, and the reader's encounter with inconsistently sustained epics like Flow Chart is one of locating pivotal wobble in the stratosphere of Ashbery's poetics.

Ashbery's lyric concerns are invariably with retrieving the moment from unrecorded notice. It's the transient nature of experience underscored by a deep sense of loss which fires Ashbery into attempting to arrest whatever proves meaningful to his impulsive plot. As he writes in 'The Improvement':

"We never live long enough in our lives/ to know what today is like./ Shards, smiling beaches,/ abandon us somehow even as we converse with them./ And the leopard is transparent, like iced tea."

Ashbery's acute sense of being disinherited from the world of things, and the poem is an attempt to establish discourse with this aesthetic, has him incessantly preoccupied with chasing meaning out of assumed appearances. His way is to puzzle worry into potential existential crisis:

"Nothing seems strong enough for/ this life to manage, that sees beyond/ into particles forming some kind of entity -/ So we get dressed kindly, crazy at the moment./ A life of afterwords begins."

('The Improvement')

Ashbery's disorientated, upended approach to his subject matter imparts the feel of innovative modernism to his work. And while his poetry is personal by way of its predominantly quiet disclosures: 'I never get hangovers until late afternoon/ and then it's like a souvenir, an arrangement,' he is never confessional in the manner of Robert Lowell or Sylvia Plath. Ashbery's quiet presence permeates, but never crowds his lyrics. Some of the finest poems to be found in this collection, 'Works On Paper I,' 'Ghost Riders Of The Moon,' 'Free Nail Polish,' 'Local Time,' 'My Gold Chain' succeed by playing enigmatic narrative against specific visual imagery. In the best of Ashbery the abstract and the concrete unite to impart allusive mystery to the poem. The ending of 'Works On Paper I' perfectly demonstrates what Ashbery does best.

"Those who wish to remain naked are coaxed out of laughter/ with tea and nobody's nose is to the grindstone/ anymore, I bet, and you can figure out these shivering trees./ But the owner of the bookstore know that the flea was blown/ out of all proportion,/ with September steps to go down in passing/ before the tremendous dogs are unleased."

Here the juxtaposition of the disarmingly casual and the lyrically authoritative combine to create Ashbery's inimitable tang of urbane poetry, a genre he orchestrates with consummate ease throughout this sparkling collection. If by comparison the long title poem suffers from a characteristic lack of focus, then the poem's obliqueness and obscurity are counterpointed by Ashbery's inexhaustibly pitched poetic eloquence.

JEREMY REED

One of the most personal poetry voices keeps showing charm.
And the stars were shining seems to be a minor Ashberry's work, but don't be confused...a great poet is always great. This book is especially delightful. Ashberry plays with the dazed reader making a strange and confusing mixture of images and sounds (something like watching "Lost Highway", by David Lynch), painting everything with his particular sense of humour and his vision of life. A bit flamboyant, but completely great. To miss it is a crime, as every vulgarity.

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