Carcanet Press Logo
Quote of the Day
an admirable concern to keep lines open to writing in Ireland, Scotland, Wales and America.
Seamus Heaney

Planisphere

John Ashbery

John Ashbery - Planisphere
Categories: 21st Century, American, LGBTQ+
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (160 pages)
(Pub. Dec 2009)
9781847770899
Out of Stock
  • Description
  • Excerpt
  • Author
  • Contents
  • Awards
  • Reviews
  • Tell me another dream. The long events surface
    wider, further apart, like autumn breakers.
    Birds are suddenly there. The house of cards
    on sand falters, fatally. I am elated.
    You never know how things work out
    except through “sleight” of hand, sometimes.

    from ‘Summer Reading’
    Even after half a century of amazing readers, John Ashbery continues to delight and challenge with his inventiveness. Planisphere takes the reader on a dizzying journey in the company of a virtuoso and sorcerer who makes the commonplace magical, disorientates and teases, and conjures glimpses of ‘horizons… bright and anxious’: ‘a space like a dream’. Planisphere restores to us a sense of joy and unease at the untried possibilities of language and of the world we take for granted.

    Cover image © Quemadura. Cover design StephenRaw.com
    Contents:

    Alcove
    Attabled with the spinning years
    B——'s mysterious greeting
    Boulevard exelmans in the rain
    Boundary issues
    Breathlike
    The Burning candle
    Chair rental
    Circa
    Decembrists
    Deep surprise
    Default mode
    El Dorado
    Episode
    Episode
    Experiment perilous
    Floating away
    For Fuck's sake
    The foreseeable future
    Fx
    Giraffe headquarters
    A goose walks along a path
    The gracious silhouette of ...What?
    Half--riders
    Happy as the sun
    He who loves and runs away
    I didn't know what time it was
    Idea of Steve
    In a wonderful place
    In one afternoon
    Is it just me or
    Just how cloudy everything gets
    The later me
    Leave the hand in
    Living in a big way
    The logistics
    Longing of the accords
    Lost sonnet
    Magnetic flowers
    More of what happened
    No extras
    No reason not to
    No rest for the weary
    Not my favorite shirt
    O Knave
    Occurrence
    The old jurisdiction
    Partial clearing
    A penitence
    Pernilla
    Perplexing ways
    The person of whom you speak
    Planisphere
    The Plywood years
    Poem
    Product placement
    Programmer
    Ragtime Cowboy Joe
    Rego park
    River of the Canoefish
    The salve merchant
    Semi--detached
    The seventh Chihuahua
    Sleepingly
    Some had lunch
    Some silly thing
    Something it wasn't
    Songs without words
    Sons of the desert
    Spooks run wild
    Sticker shock
    Street dust
    Stress related
    Structures in sand
    The stumming
    Summer reading
    Surprising announcement
    Tessera
    Then there was the occasional abasement
    They knew what they wanted
    This incredible tapestry
    This listener
    Tous les regretz
    The Tower of London
    Trespassing
    Um
    Unchiseled
    Upstate dancers
    Uptick
    Variation in the key of c
    The virgin king
    Voice--over
    The winemakers
    Working overtime
    World's largest glass of water
    Wulf
    You haven't received the letters yet?
    Zero percentage
    Zymurgy 
    John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. His books of poetry include Breezeway ; Quick Question ; Planisphere ; Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems, which was awarded the 2008 International Griffin Poetry Prize; A Worldly Country ; Where Shall I Wander ; and Self-Portrait in ... read more
    Awards won by John Ashbery Winner, 1997  Gold Medal for Poetry Winner, 2001 Wallace Stevens Award Winner, 1995 Robert Frost Medal Winner, 1976 National Book Critics Circle Award (Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror) Winner, 1976 National Book Award (Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror) Winner, 1976 Pulitzer Award (Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror)
    Praise for John Ashbery 'That Ashbery had these several extended works underway simultaneously testifies not only to his unflagging fealty to the form but also to his extravagantly various powers of invention and intelligence... Even as the references that undergird these projects range from the reassuringly familiar to the dauntingly obscure, as is typical with Ashbery, they characterize a rarefied mental atmosphere, one in which the poet's droll self-awareness deflates what otherwise might be pretension... Ashbery recognized the porous border between decision and delusion, between finality and its seeming appearance. This collection of unfinished works allows readers to tread that border as well.'

    Albert Mobilio, Poetry

    'This is an exciting missing piece of the jigsaw for Ashbery enthusiasts. Here language fizzes with a vital "off-kilter quality" and an Ashberian state of open-ended possibility.'

    The Poetry Book Society Summer Bulletin

    'I'll keep returning to The Wave, knowing that each time I do, I'll connect with poems, and lines in poems, I haven't noticed before and recconect with those that have resonated already'
    Pam Thompson, The North
    'John Ashbery's final collection of poetry disguises itself well as a mid-career high. The energy and modernity of his strange little worlds tell nothing of his age.'
    Stand Magazine


      'More than a century after Arthur Rimbaud composed his Illuminations they are reborn in John Ashbery's magnificent translation. It is fitting that the major American poet since Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens should give us this noble version of the precursor of all three.'
    Harold Bloom
    'A fine collection of poems rooted in 21st-century America.'
    Robert McCrum, The Observer
      'More than a century after Arthur Rimbaud composed his Illuminations they are reborn in John Ashbery's magnificent translation. It is fitting that the major American poet since Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens should give us this noble version of the precursor of all three.'
    Harold Bloom
    'Quick Question, with the hushed intensity of its music and great lyric beauty, could only be Ashbery.'
    Ian Thomson, Financial Times
     The book invites the reader to poetic gluttony. It serves as a corrective to the monoglot provincialism by which the Anglophone world is still bedevilled.
    Sean O'Brien, Independent
     'The lyrics in Breezeway, a new collection by the octogenarian poet John Ashbery are as good as his finest. I especially like the final poem, poignantly reprising the last line of Keats' Ode to a Nightingale', "Do I wake or sleep?"'
    Salley Vickers, The Observer - The New Review, 29.11.2015.
      'John Ashbery's Collected Poems 1956-1987, edited by Mark Ford (Carcanet), was a book I found inexhaustible. Possibly the greatest living English-speaking poet and one of the most prolific, Ashbery takes language to its limits, so that words serve as pointers to shifting experiences that elude description. Containing his masterpiece 'Self-Portrait In A Convex Mirror', one of the most penetrating 20th-century meditations on what it means to be human, this collection succeeded in stirring my thoughts as well as delighting me.'
    John Gray The Guardian Books Of The Year 2010
       'The careering, centrifugal side of Girls on the Run is one of its most effective tools in creating its special ainbience of good-humoured menace ... Ashbery has made the slush of signification, the realm where words slip, slide, perish and decay, uniquely his own.'
    David Wheatley, Times Literary Supplement, 30 June, 2000
       'In his seventies John Ashbery offers a sprightly and energetic alternative. Instead of being sluggish he demands that the self must be even more alert, more vigilant, more attentive to the world around it, not indifferent to and weary of it. Alert, vigilant, attentive ... Wakefulness, the brilliantly evocative title of Ashbery's collection.'
    Stephen Matterson, 'The Capacious Art of Poetry,' Poetry Ireland Review 62, 114
        'The Mooring of Starting Out is filled with illustrations glimpsed through luminous, funny, formidably intelligent and often heartbreaking poems.'
    Andrew Zawacki, 'A wave of music,' Times Literary Supplement, 12 June, 1998
You might also be interested in:
Cover of Odd Blocks
Odd Blocks Kay Ryan
Cover of Overlord
Overlord Jorie Graham
Share this...
The Carcanet Blog Baby Schema: Isabel Galleymore read more The Iron Bridge: Rebecca Hurst read more Sleepers Awake: Oli Hazzard read more The Miraculous Season: V.R. 'Bunny' Lang, edited by Rosa Campbell read more Egg/Shell: Victoria Kennefick read more The Devil Prefers Mozart: Anthony Burgess read more
Find your local bookshop logo
Arts Council Logo
We thank the Arts Council England for their support and assistance in this interactive Project.
This website ©2000-2024 Carcanet Press Ltd