Chinese Whispers: Poems
- Book Review,
by John Ashbery
From Publishers Weekly
Ashbery's most recent style equal parts cracked drawing room dialogue, 4-H Americana, withering sarcasm and sleeve-worn pathos has been perfected over five or so books and adapted by generationally diverse poets from James Tate to Max Winter. The late Kenneth Koch's description of Ashbery as "lazy and quick" remains thoroughly apropos; these 61 page-or-two poems can seem brilliantly tossed off, much like those in his 2000 collection, Your Name Here. The title is appropriate too: Chinese Whispers is the British name for the game of Telephone, where children (or adults) gather in a circle and whisper a "secret" word or phrase into the ear next to them. The last person says it out loud; the results are often "off" in funny, surprising and telling ways. The surprise, in poem after poem, is that high and low comedy and offhanded delivery can read like simultaneous expressions of pain and regeneration and that they do not dull after multiple permutations are spun out: "The beginning of the middle is like that./ Looking back it was all valleys, shrines floating on the powdered hill,// ambivalence that came in a flood sometimes, though warm, always, for the next tenant/ to abide there." As with all Ashbery's work, these poems leave plenty of room for readers to abide.Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Since winning the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1975 for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, Ashbery has been regarded as one of our major poets. This thoughtful new collection may not be any great advance-with Ashbery's elliptical style, how far can one go?-but it does maintain his momentum. The eye is immediately caught by some lines in an early poem-"Our lives ebbing always toward the center,/ the unframed portrait"-which feel like a key to Ashbery's aesthetic; he doesn't want us to look only at the center, at the shapes that predominate, but at the details along the edge. Thus, at first reading, his poems can seem like a string of out-of-sequence images, but they do bleed a definite atmosphere. Often, that atmosphere is disquieting or at least restless, but in these autumnal pieces a sense of calm predominates. True, the tale "jerks/ back and forth like the tail of a kite," and frogs and envelopes mutter, "That was some joust!" But the energy crackles only momentarily; here, things repeatedly fall, ebb, dissipate, or descend. Not that these are dreary pieces; there is a light touch and consistent pacing throughout, making this a satisfying read. Given Ashbery's stature, this is recommended for all contemporary poetry collections.Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Ashbery, prolific, incisive, and bewitching, is not only a great poet, he's a philosopher and a tease. His balletic leaps from the abstract to the concrete, the inanimate to the animate, the intimate to the elusive provoke and unsettle until the reader surrenders to his elegant charm and wise humor, his sly toying with the oddities and hidden significance of colloquialisms and social convention, and his offhanded yet wistful inquiries into the nature of time and the hunger for meaning that drives our dream-drenched lives. Gallantly confiding and satirically funny, the poet pretends that he's above it all, but for all his glimmering and grace, sauciness and savoir faire, he, like everyone else, is forever fishing for clues and playing detective, anxious to tease out something timeless from the transient babble and whirl of our routines. And what he discovers and revels in is a glistening twilight beauty, lovely and ephemeral, and a deep resolve to stick around to see the sun rise and set again, to share stories, to cherish simple things, to stay attuned and spellbound. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Tom Devaney, The Philadelphia Inquirer
"Absolutely unruly and utterly enjoyable. A mix of mercurial prose poems, disembodied lyrics, and wayward narratives."
James Gibbons, Bookforum
"Chinese Whispers . . . transform[s] the most transient of expressions into something . . . to be contemplated, amused by, stared at in bewilderment."
The Economist
"Mr. Ashbery has an ear for speech—no one more so."
Review
"Like Thomas Hardy, W. B Yeats, and Wallace Stevens before him, John Ashbery augments in poetic splendor in his seventies. Your Name Here joins Hardy's Winter Words, Yeats's Last Poems and Plays, Steven's The Rock as one of the enduring monuments in the language."--Harold Bloom
Book Description
Chinese Whispers is the British name of a game called Telephone in America. According to a certain "Professor Hoffmann" in his book Drawing Room Amusements (1879), "the participants are arranged in a circle, and the first player whispers a story or message to the next player, and so on round the circle. The original story is then compared with the final version, which has often changed beyond recognition."
"Chinese Whispers" is also the superb title poem in this new collection of sixty-three poems by John Ashbery. In these works, as perhaps in much poetry, the verbal nucleus that is the original incitement toward a poem undergoes twists and modulations before arriving at its final form. The changes are caused not by careless listening to the speech of others, but by endlessly proliferating trains of ideas that a single word or phrase ignites in the poet's mind. These alter the face of the poem even as they contribute to it and become part of its fabric. As in a sea change the poem has been transformed, often into "something rich and strange," but the strangeness is that of thought being opened up, like a geode, to reveal unexpected facets of meaning.
John Ashbery has been called "America's greatest living poet" by Harold Bloom. Now in his seventy-fifth year, he continues to write poetry that is dazzlingly inventive and original.
From the Inside Flap
"Since the death of Wallace Stevens in 1955, we have been in the Age of Ashbery. It delights me that Chinese Whispers is John Ashbery at his most poignant, lucid, and perceptive." —Harold Bloom "‘We can only go on extracting fishhooks/ from meanings that were intended to be casual.’ John Ashbery has been extracting those ‘fishhooks’ for many years now, but perhaps none of his collections have been as inspiring and ethically rigorous as is Chinese Whispers—a book that, for all its humor, parodic narrative, and droll ‘telephone’ playing, is passionately concerned with Wallace Stevens’ question ‘How to live. What to do.’ Here is Ashbery at his most relaxed and yet most intense—letting no one off the hook, least of all himself. No other poet writing today has Ashbery’s ability to surprise us at every turn—to force us to rethink what we thought we understood. It is a dazzling performance!" —Marjorie Perloff "Ashbery is astonishingly original, and though his mannerisms have been widely imitated, he himself has imitated no one." —Edmund White "Anything new by Ashbery has become for poetry the natural noise of now." —John Bayley "No book by John Ashbery is ever quite like the one that came before it. If he sometimes seems to be a figure out of the recent future, that is because Ashbery has the true innovator’s desire not to repeat himself." —J. D. McClatchy, Poetry "I find him prepossessing." —Marianne Moore "[Ashbery is] a national treasure . . . his poems perfect in their pitch, astonishing for their sheer good nature." —Linda Gregerson "The sheer range of Ashbery’s style is unparalleled among contemporary writers." —Fred Moramarco "Ashbery’s poems have become an integral part of the lives of those who read poetry. He is one of the few authors whose every new book we await hungrily, with the feeling that our souls are leaning forward into something significant, refreshing and transformative." —Forrest Gander, The Providence Sunday Journal
About the Author
John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927 and educated at Harvard and Columbia. He is Charles P. Stevenson, Jr., Professor of Language and Literature at Bard College and lives in New York City and Hudson, New York.
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