Description: "Ashbery just talks, calmly and evenly, sifting through the verbal detritus of civilization and making fascinating sculptures out of what he finds." - Time magazine "John Ashbery is our great poet of the interior landscape--all the bric-a-brac we carry around in the attic of our minds." - New York Times Book Review "Among the poets of the New York School, Ashbery has been the most influential in opening up new possibilities for the American lyric. He has done this by enlivening the page with diction of a startling heterogeneity; by being more broadly allusive than any other modern poet, including Eliot; by being boyish and amusing while maintaining emotional depth; by finding a gorgeousness of imagery rare since Stevens; and by taking headstrong risks." - New Republic "...Ashbery...shows his complete mastery of his late idiom: associative leaps..., flippant philosophical statements...and chatty quips...Still inimitably questioning, Ashbery continues to inhabit a worldly country all his own." - Publishers Weekly Provocative and entertaining...satiric as well as elegaic, often funny, sometimes sardonic....Followers of his career can admire his searching range of observation and his murmuring continuity with the entire tradition of Western poetry...The reader''s imagination is lit up by its own energy of interpretation....Seeking out poetry is a distinct hunger, one that famishes as it satisfies: Ashbery-Sheherazade never really winds up his skein of tales, merely suspending us from night to night, from page to turning page....What difference has it made to American poetry to have had Ashbery within its precincts for the last fifty years?...Just as in Ashbery''s lines there hover the voices of the past, so in future lines by another original poet will hover the voice of Ashbery. - Helen Vendler, New York Review of Books "John Ashbery, who is 80 this year, has probably had more influence on the kinds of poetry currently being written in the US than any other living poet. His work has inspired and shaped a large and active "tribe of John", to borrow the title of a volume of essays on his work by his American admirers. It has become customary to see Ashbery''s capacious, open-ended poetics, his sinuous braiding together of the languages of advertising, politics, cartoons, aesthetics and soap opera, as a postmodern updating of Walt Whitman''s bold claim in "Song of Myself" to be large and "contain multitudes"." - Financial Times "With a book every two years or so, this master of imagistic invention, compassionate wit, and linguistic magic expresses undiminished joie de vivre in the face of all that tests our senses of rightness and humor. Nonchalant yet intense, surreal and exacting, bemused yet full of longing, Ashbery is a romantic and a skeptic, a stoic and a dreamer... conversational yet subtle poet... Ashbery''s syncopated lyrics are sheer pleasure in their music, collaged images, stabbing perceptions. Mysterious and truth-bearing poems that inspire us to ''flame on, flame on.''" - ALA Booklist "The poems in Ashbery''s latest collection are able to entertain-a word rarely used these days to describe contemporary American poetry... Ashbery gives us wit, empathy, and compassion embodied in playful language... these are the poems of the pleasures of old age, and Ashbery is able to give pleasure even in poems of heartbreak ...He certainly remains one of American''s most exhilarating lyric poets. Highly recommended." - Library Journal "...A Worldly Country isn''t only for those already initiated in Ashbery''s particular brand of genius, it''s also an ideal starting point for the uninitiated or even the frightened...each poem contains at least one Ashberyian moment...moments of dry rumination, eloquent and ironically passionless." - Rain Taxi "There are also achingly lovely lyrical passages...Ashbery''s work is still flexing new muscles." - Boston Review "By the end of the collection, we''ve come to trust Ashbery''s judgment implicitly. Although much of the poetry coming out from major presses sounds like it was edited by multiple marketing committees, whitewashed for the masses, standouts like Dennis and Ashbery are still finding shelf space." - St. Louis Post-Dispatch "[Ashbery] is...a genius. Ashbery is only a poetic drifter, but what a drifter!...here, he is repeatedly at his best, wondering at and wandering through the mappemonde of his rare and peculiar consciousness." - Philadelphia Inquirer "Bottom Line:...piercingly insightful ruminations about love and loss." Grade: A- - Entertainment Weekly "With this latest collection, A Worldly Country, the prolific author continues to cement his place in the canon." - Time Out New York "The most remarkable thing about John Ashbery''s later poetry is its iron uniformity of style -- a master''s style, highly polished and difficult to penetrate. In "A Wordly Country" (Ecco, 76 pages, $23.95), Mr. Ashbery''s latest book, his sly and discursive voice makes itself heard with unquestionable authority and a propulsive, off-kilter fluency once again..."A Worldly Country" is a remarkable book, filled with fresh and vigorous language, assured and exquisitely paced." - New York Sun "Deceptively breezy, deceptively opaque, "A Worldly Country" is a treasury of unusual, stimulating thought-prompts that will bear repeated reading and further assessment." - San Francisco Chronicle "Many poems find their speakers looking back, bewildered by how time has raced by with the same imperceptible speed that plots advance in novels and movies... It makes sense that aging would preoccupy Ashbery, who turns 79 in July, but what''s striking is how movingly insightful that reflection is. ...That Ashbery handles these issues with such intelligence and subtlety throughout "A Worldly Country" proves him one of those rare artists -- one whose craft only improves with age." - The Oregonian (Portland)

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