Hotel Lautreamont

Häftad, Engelska, 1996

319 kr

Slutsåld

The Count of Lautreamont - a nineteenth-century poet about whom little is known, except that he spent his brief adult life in various hotels in Paris, checking out of his transient existence at the age of 24 - is one of the forgotten presences alive in John Ashbery's collection. Hotel Lautreamont includes the poems and sequences he wrote during composition of his enormous poem Flow Chart, published in 1991 to great critical puzzlement and acclaim.The title poem 'experiments' in pantoum form; and there are other demanding formal challenges. The poet proves as supple as Houdini in bringing them off. His obliquities are entertaining and eloquent. It is no longer necessary to describe him as 'obscure'or 'difficult': his poetic strategies are now part of the mainstream of American and British writing. He is "quite simply the finest poet in English of his generation" (The Times)

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum1996-10-22
Mått152 x 229 x 8 mm
Vikt280 g
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
FörlagCarcanet Press Ltd
ISBN9780856359934

Tillhör följande kategorier

Poesi inom Skonlitteratur

John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. His books of poetry include Breezeway; Quick Question; Planisphere; Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems, which was awarded the 2008 International Griffin Poetry Prize; A Worldly Country; Where Shall I Wander; and Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. The winner of many prizes and awards both nationally and internationally, in 2011 he received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, and in 2012 he received a National Humanities Medal, presented by President Obama at the White House. He lived in New York until his death, aged ninety, in 2017.

"The essential subjects of Ashbery's poetry - subjectivity and time as we all experience them - are themselves general and elusive; and though in passing it says a good deal about them, its means are in the end mimetic rather than discursive. The intrusion of "any particular reality" could only compromise its radically precarious and indeterminate sttus which, together with the faultless connectedness of its surface, makes Ashbery's work a wholly original poetic analogue for being alive."(Nicholas Everett, The Times Literary Supplement, 12th February 1993)"This is cosmopolitan, surreal verse that constantly shifts direction, like someone flipping from one TV channel to the next...Beneath the wild exuberance of the language, I catch the voice of a man who's working life out as he goes along, looking for meaning despite knowing how temporary everything is. This is a book to be savoured, soaked in, the best book of poetry this year, bar nothing."(Steven Waling, City Life Manchester, 4th November 1992)"What Hotel Lautremont confirms is that Ashbery stages arguments in order to clear the way for a self that is not pre-formed and settled, but that startlingly forms and reforms under the pressure of circumstance. The result is poetry fully and startlingly engaged with the way things happen, and a potentially far-reaching practice."(David Herd, New Statesman and Society, 4th December 1992)"The career of a great writer must be one of constant self-renewal, and John Ashbery's most recent collection, Hotel Lautremont, provides evidence of his continuing poetic development. The epic intent of his previous volume, Flow Chart (Carcanet, 1991), has been replaced here by the more characteristic mood of his lyrics and elegies; but these are shorter poems which display an increased command of language and of form. Stemming in part from Mallarme and in part from Whitman, Ashbery's work creates a tension in which the fine networks of linguistic reverie are balanced by the stong sense of an American tradition."(Peter Ackroyd, The Times Literary Supplement, 4th December 1992)