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About
A 1995 collection of poems that finds John Ashbery at his most conversational, funny, and surprising In Can You Hear, Bird, John Ashbery's seventeenth collection, language is both a plaything and a sandbox. The poems are arranged not in the order of their composition but alphabetically, by the first letter in their titles, like the neatly arrayed keys of some fabulous Seussical instrument. In line after line, Ashbery demonstrates his alertness to language as it is spoken, heard, broadcast, and dreamed-and sets himself the task of rewriting, redefining, and revising the American idiom we think we know so well. Can You Hear, Bird is a decisive example of the uniquely Ashberyan sensibility his many fans love, revealing a generous and acute chronicler of the everyday bizarre, an observant and humane humorist, and an ear trained on decoding our modern world's beguiling polyphony.
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Reviews
"Polyphonic and flowing, continuously able to assimilate surprise and a new note, never too many notes so long as the arts of connection and blending can be summoned . . . Ashbery has taken us farther down those pathways than anyone I have read."
David Hamilton, The Iowa Review
"Ashbery is our Nabokovian genius (at times he seems invented by Nabokov): he's the great lepidopterist of language and life in our late century. He delights in English as if it were his second language, or not his language at all; and like Nabokov's fictions, Ashbery's poems talk best when they talk about themselves. No poet argues better about poetry."
William Logan, The New Criterion
"John Ashbery has never written as genially, hilariously, and heartbreakingly as he does in these new poems. . . . Literary echoes, puns, paragrams, and mini-narratives collide so as to create the image of a world bursting with memories and overflowing with possibilities."
David Hamilton, The Iowa Review