Volume 54, Number 5 · March 29, 2007
The Democratic Eye
By Helen Vendler
A Worldly Country: New Poems
by John Ashbery
HarperCollins, 76 pp., $23.95
John Ashbery's new volume, A Worldly Country, is another installment of the strange diaries regularly appearing from the poet over the last fifty years. (Ashbery will be eighty next July, and has had the good luck to retain the capacity to write his decades into poetry.) I think of Ashbery's shorter poems as 'diaries' because so many of them have the dailiness, the occasional inconsequentiality, the fragmentary quality, the confiding candor, and the obliquity we associate with the diary form. The diarist, careless of communication (since he already has all the information necessary for the decoding of his own pri-vate pages), may remain indifferent to explicitness, to 'message,' to 'statement,' to 'meaning.' The diary has, at its off-the-cuff best, a kind of intriguing charm: its vicissitudes (digressions, interruptions, unexplained allusions) keep later annotators busy; the elliptical text can end up occupying less space than its commentaries.
Review, 3815 words
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