Volume 28, Number 12 · July 16, 1981
Sociable Comets
By Helen Vendler
Shadow Train
by John Ashbery
Viking, 50 pp., $4.95 (paper)
Descending Figure
by Louise Glück
Ecco Press, 48 pp., $9.95
When it was first announced, John Ashbery's new book had a title—Paradoxes and Oxymorons—that called up Donne's Paradoxes and Problems (the usual title for a collection of short pieces circulated privately in Donne's lifetime and posthumously published). Ashbery's witty variation placed propositional impossibility (paradox) next to figurative impossibility (oxymoron) to tell us that he was about to propose the contradictions of life in the contradictions of rhetoric. An oxymoron ('dazzling darkness') is a paradox compressed into a single self-contradicting phrase, and is therefore the show-off among figures of speech.
Review, 3597 words
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