Planisphere

by John Ashbery

Book Overview

"Ashbery is a national treasure."
--New York Times Book Review

The poetry of John Ashbery has been awarded virtually every conceivable literary prize including the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Planisphere is a new collection by one of America's most innovative and influential poets--an exceptional artist whose work stands alongside the finest of Whitman, Dickinson,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 006191522X
• ISBN13: 9780061915222
• Release Date: December 2010
• Publisher: Ecco Press
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.7" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

An Old Favorite

People seem to either like Ashbery or they don't like him. I like him. Once again Ashbery has chosen a title that beautifully captures the whole formal enterprise of the collection. A planisphere is a map of half or more of the celestial sphere with a device for indicating the part of a given location visible at a given time, or a representation of the whole or a part of a sphere on a plane. Face it, poems are like that. There is no such thing as a poem alone. All poems are connected to other poems in an unending chain, like stars in the sky. Ashbery's poetry reveals this clearly. His poems are sovereign objects, beautiful discrete things in themselves. And yet, because of the way they are constructed, they call out to the wider world of discourse. The poems do not speak for the world of discourse, any more than the world (a part of it,this review, for example) speaks for the poems; a poem is not a bridge between two worlds. A poem evokes a parallel being, which we may call a reading, and this reading asserts its own sovereignty, leaving the way for a third text, then a fourth and fifth and so on. This is also true of writers as well as readers of poetry. One star is inconceivable, as is one poem, even though we wish upon a star, and we have our favorite poems. Everyone knows that any poet has a limited repertoire. Having a favorite is like preferring one version of a familiar tune over another: 'Oh, that is one of Dickinson's finest performances!' I gave "Planisphere" four rather than five stars only because I like some of his other books such as "Hotel Lautreamont", "The Double Dream of Spring" and "Three Poems" better.