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Your Name Here: Poems

Farrar, Straus and Giroux Search Farrar, Straus and Giroux by John Ashbery Search John Ashbery

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I got kind of frenzied after the waitinghad stopped, but now am cool as a suburban gardenin some lost city. When it came time for my speechI could think of nothing, of course.I gave a little talk about the onion - how its flavorinspires us, its shape informs our architecture.There were so many other things I wanted to say, too,but, dandified, I couldn't strut,couldn't sit down for all the spit and polish.Now it's your turn to say something about the wallin the garden. It can be anything. - from "Terminal"In his twentieth collection, John Ashbery continues to examine the themes that have preoccupied him of late: age and its inevitable losses, memories of childhood, the transforming magic of dreams in daily living. Your Name Here offers souvenirs to readers, inviting them to "personalize" the poems with their own associations and memories. Ashbery's masterful voice is heard with renewed vigor and poigancy in these beautiful poems.

Customer Reviews:
Redeemed Area

Ashbery's writing with the crackle of someone just starting out. It's like now that he knows he's in the canon (thanks, Bloom), he can really go looby and make English swing. The autumn leaves fall a little lighter in these poems; reverie (always present) takes a back seat to inspired goofiness. I've admired other Ashbery books--this one I loved. It's made my own elite canon of bathroom reading and not a poem's let me down. I hope I grow old just like this.

Peremptory splendours abound
We've always been sleepily ardent in our admiration of John Ashbery, a boosterism which borders on a fanatical apathy: his perky atonality has a certain depressingly insistent gaiety about it. We value the kinky ecumenism between the patois and the mandarin, the somewhat dopey collision between the vernacular and the highfalutin. We can't wait until the biography comes out, along with its subject, so we can gain some insight into his methods.

We have here lyrics of a rehearsed suddenness, of a customary unpredictability: language whose smooth bumps and well-paved potholes inspire both fearer and farer, both reader and rider, to explore more deeply the simplistic intricacies of Ashbery's frabjously deadpan patois. The images collide in an amiable showdown, a triumphantly graceful slapstick, a dreadfully solemn opera bouffe, which we cannot readily forget. Herein we have the greeting and the greening of a life with all its happy calamities and soulshattering lucky breaks -- an ennui that is at least as jazzy as those halcyon ecstasies of yore, those drab celebrations of the past's disastrous victories.

Negative Capability
Aw nerts this guy is too much for me. I feel like one of the girls with names like Linda, Ruth, and Pat from the 1940s who stand next to an airplane when this poet comes along from the next century. "Your Name Here", the very title, suggests his "negative capability" is acting up again, with results typically mind-blowing, keeping everyone guessing. I rank this almost on the level of the great "Can You Hear, Bird."

Not his best
I disagree with the review below.