Volume 40, Number 10 · May 27, 1993
Outside the Shady Octopus Saloon
By Michael Wood
Hotel Lautréamont
by John Ashbery
Knopf, 157 pp., $23.00
The Man With Night Sweats
by Thom Gunn
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 87 pp., $15.00
Wallace Stevens wrote of the need to 'confect / the final elegance.' The phrase seems unusually appropriate for the work of John Ashbery and Thom Gunn, but it also shifts and turns as we apply it to them. These poets were elegant from the very beginning of their careers, their elegance never anything but 'final.' In another sense, it is not final even now, some dozen volumes of verses since they started—to be precise, fifteen for Ashbery, ten for Gunn. Neither the books nor the poems are shut off from the raggedness of experience, their elegance has room for the provisional, the derelict, the unmanageable: for 'trash and understanding,' as Ashbery put it in Flow Chart (1991).
Review, 4092 words
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