New Releases by John Ashbery

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.

One of the greatest living poets in English here explores the work of six writers he often finds himself reading "in order to get started" when writing, poets he turns to as "a poetic jump-start for times when the batteries have run down." Among those whom John Ashbery reads at such times are John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Raymond Roussel, John Wheelwright, Laura Riding, and David Schubert. Less familiar than some, under Ashbery''s scrutiny these poets emerge as the powerful but private and somewhat wild voices whose eccentricity has kept them from the mainstream--and whose vision merits Ashbery''s efforts, and our own, to read them well. Deeply interesting in themselves, Ashbery''s reflections on these poets of "another tradition" are equally intriguing for what they tell us about Ashbery''s own way of reading, writing, and thinking. With its indirect clues to his work and its generous and infectious appreciation of a remarkable group of poets, this book conveys the passion, delight, curiosity, and insight that underlie the art and craft of poetry for writer and reader alike. Even as it invites us to discover the work of poets in Ashbery''s other tradition, it reminds us of Ashbery''s essential place in our own.

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.

To mark John Ashbery''s 70th birthday, Carcanet publish his first five books of poems in a single volume: The Tennis Court Oath (1962); Same Trees (1956); Rivers and Mountains (1966); The Double Dream of Spring (1970); and Three Poems (1972).

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).

The collected art criticism of John Ashbery

Selections from the first three decades of the poetry of John Ashbery, author of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award The late John Ashbery was a poet whose “teasing, delicate, soulful lines made him one of the most influential figures of late-20th and early 21st century American literature.” (The New York Times) This important volume gathers work from his first ten collections of poetry, from Some Trees, which was chosen by W.H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series (1956), to A Wave (1984). The 138 poems in this volume include short lyrics, haikus, prose poems, and many of Ashbery’s major long poems, including “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” offering a beautiful distillation of the first thirty years of his remarkable, groundbreaking work.