Quick Question: New Poems
Ashbery is covertly prophetic in his forecasts of new forms of crisis and folly, weaving prescience into the very meter of his always surprising, frolicking, knowing, and compassionate poems as he channels the increasingly discordant, digitized soundtrack of our lives. With the recent addition of the National Humanities Medal to his remarkable list of major awards, venerable, imaginative, and vital Ashbery, author of several dozen books, is nimble, funny, philosophical, and artistically adventurous in this zesty and substantial collection. He revels in colloquialisms and paradox and practices a provocative, remarkably fluent form of linguistic collage that echoes the perpetual churning of the mind. In brisk and disconcerting vignettes, witty and plangent riddles, sharp critiques of the absurdities we accept as reality, and adieus tossed off as the speaker flees the scene of some debacle, Ashbery addresses time, war, crime, tyranny, and toxicity with the rueful insouciance of those who passionately embrace life as the world burns. “How sad that everything has to change, / yet what a relief, too!” And then, “Let it mean something.” And so it does. --Donna Seaman