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Worldly Country
| Author |
Ashbery, John |
| Price |
£9.95 <convert> |
| Biblio |
1857549198;
pp. |
| ISBN13 |
9781857549195 |
| Binding |
Paperback |
| Published |
February 2007 |
| Publisher |
Carcanet Press Ltd |
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| John Ashbery's new collection speaks from the haunted, ambiguous cities of the twenty-first century. These are the landscapes of the worldly country we have created, both ominous and absurd. Perspectives dissolve into dazzle. The clock is ticking: we are on the wrong set and the cameras are rolling. Ashbery's supple, vigorous idiom conjures an unpredictable world, astonished by moments of piercing directness: the pause to share a winter pear, the sudden apprehension that the places we left fallow 'will be cultivated by another'. "A Worldly Country" tells us where we are, now exhilarating, now vertiginous; full of heartbreak and (as always with Ashbery) full of every kind of mirth, from the most sombre to the most enchanted. |
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