Volume 52, Number 10 · June 9, 2005
A Holiday in Reality
By Mark Ford
Where Shall I Wander
by John Ashbery
Ecco, 81 pp., $22.95
'What we have here,' the narrator of the title poem (which is in prose) of Where Shall I Wander declares, 'are certain individuals intent on disarraying the public gravitas of things.' For over fifty years now Ashbery has been one of those most adept at revealing how 'the public gravitas of things' can be disarrayed, challenged, neutralized, re-angled, turned inside out, or at the very least sifted and leavened. This new volume, his twenty-first, offers the burdened—or thrill-seeking—reader yet another extended and beguiling invitation to embark on what Wallace Stevens once shrewdly called a 'holiday in reality.'
Review, 3529 words
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