New Releases by John Ashbery

You meant more than life to me. I lived through you not knowing, not knowing I was living. I learned that you called for me. I came to where you were living, up a stair. There was no one there. No one to appreciate me. The legality of it upset a chair. Many times to celebrate we were called together and where we had been there was nothing there, nothing that is anywhere. We passed obliquely, leaving no stare. When the sun was done muttering, in an optimistic way, it was time to leave that there. -- from "The New Higher"

Fifty years of writing on literature, film, and art by one of the most influential poets and critics of our time

This catalog features views provided by Swiss-American photographer Rudy Burckhardt.

Victor Enns is a poet who engages and beguiles by giving us the simple complexities of childhood on the prairies. Boy is richly evocative of time and place: small town Manitoba in the 60''s. Enns gives the reader both archetypal and singular experiences which encompass the fluster and cruelty of childhood encounters, the sometimes bitter nature of faith and the fever of new temptations, and understandings. In part an insightful family story Enns reveals the half-secret places where a child makes room for his true life, a life he sees walking towards him from a great distance. Here is poetry both measured and exhilarating, both lyrical and touched by Enns''s own brand of dark wit. Encountering the breathtaking and heartbreaking poems of child abuse toward the end of the collection we gain a new appreciation for both the poet and his fearless poems.

Poems "originally published in Adventures in Poetry magazine, 1970."

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.

Robert Mapplethorpe''s reputation rests largely on a body of black and white sexual imagery, yet he was one of the most elegant still-life photographers. His flower studies, to which he sometimes referred to as his ''New York flowers'' are slightly poisonous and very sexual. This will be the most decorative of all the Mapplethorpe books.

Artist''s book consisting of objects and 3 folders in a wooden box. The objects, by David Ireland, are a cement ball, a section of copper sheeting in a slide mount, a piece of wire shaped like an ear, and a shaped piece of house paint. The folders contain the text by Ashbery, photos and Kodaliths by Abe Frajndlich, and two painted pieces of wooden wallboard. The box handle was fabricated in cast iron by Shahin of Albany.

John Ashbery’s most renowned collection of poetry -- Winner of The Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award First released in 1975, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror is today regarded as one of the most important collections of poetry published in the last fifty years. Not only in the title poem, which the critic John Russell called “one of the finest long poems of our period,” but throughout the entire volume, Ashbery reaffirms the poetic power that made him an outstanding figure in contemporary literature. These are poems “of breathtaking freshness and adventure in which dazzling orchestrations of language open up whole areas of consciousness no other American poet as ever begun to explore” (The New York Times).

In the thirty years that John Ashbery has been writing his acclaimed poetry, he has also been one of America''s most important art critics--first for the Paris Herald Tribune, then as executive editor of ARTnews, next as critic for New York, and later for Newsweek. Reported Sightings is a generously illustrated selection of his best writings on art. This rich volume covers the wide range of Ashbery''s interests--including Surrealism, nineteenth-century French art, Abstract Expressionism, architecture, and design.

An anthology of poetry, drawn from all periods of the author''s work.