John Ashbery is the most influential American poet of the late 20th-century and is only the second writer, after Philip Roth, to be honored in his lifetime by the Library of America with Collected Poems: 1956-1987. A love poet of Whitmanic scope, Ashbery, one of my favorites, never fails to delight and inspire.

With this volume, The Library of America inaugurates a collected edition of the works of America’s preeminent living poet. Beginning with Some Trees in 1956, John Ashbery has charted a profoundly original and individual course that has opened up pathways for subsequent generations of poets. At once hermetic and exuberantly curious, meditative and unnervingly funny, dreamlike and steeped in everyday realities, and alive to every nuance of American speech, these are poems that constantly discover new worlds within language. This first volume of the collected Ashbery includes the complete texts of his first twelve books, including such groundbreaking collections as Rivers and Mountains, Three Poems, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1975), and Houseboat Days. It also features an unprecedented gathering of more than sixty previously uncollected poems written over a period of four decades, a rare treasure trove for poetry lovers. This volume is a landmark portrait of a modern master.

“Since the death of Wallace Stevens in 1955, we have been in the Age of Ashbery.”
—Harold Bloom

Mark Ford, editor, is the author of two acclaimed collections of poetry, Land- locked and Soft Sift, and the critical study Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams. His book-length interview, John Ashbery in Conversation with Mark Ford, was published in 2003. He contributes regularly to the Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, and The New York Review of Books and is currently a senior lecturer at University College London.

Imprint: Library of America
Distributor: Penguin Group USA, Inc
Publication Date: 10-16-2008
Pages: 950
Measurements: 0.00in X 0.00in X 0.00in X 0.10lb