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A captivating experiment in traditional poetic form, from one of the most untraditional American poets ever to set pen to paper At first glance, John Ashbery's Shadow Train seems to embrace the constraints of traditional poetic form-but closer reading reveals that this work is Ashbery at his revolutionary best. In fifty poems, each consisting solely of four connected quatrains, Ashbery apparently plays by the rules while simultaneously violating every single one. Over and over again, the familiar, almost sonnet-like sixteen-line form creates an outline of a poem within which, one would expect, poetry is meant to arrive-as a station waits for a train. And yet, as with many of the world's greatest poems, the act of creating poetry also relies on the reading and the reader-in other words, as this collection's signature poem "Paradoxes and Oxymorons" puts it, "the poem is / you." In Shadow Train, Ashbery demonstrates how language influences our experience of reality, creating it and sustaining it while also remaining mysterious and ineffable: constantly arriving, but impossible to catch.
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Reviews
"A poem by Mr. Ashbery, even when it offers itself as one page and 16 lines, is really a slice of meditation. At any moment his work is less a particular poem than poetry, or a long poem in progress."
Denis Donoghue, The New York Times Book Review
"Most contemporary American poetry wants only to offer what Helen Vendler has called 'an interior state clarified in language.' . . . The ghost or shadow poetry of Stevens and Ashbery and others can equally claim the title of art, but it is based upon a different premise: that we can never see the object or the poem as it really is, never quite know what we see or see what we know. . . . Ashbery h
Helen Vendler, The New York Review of Books
"As seductive as ever . . . Ashbery's sentences are not centripetal; their orbits are long ellipses, full of the irregularities of planetary distraction. Or, like sociable comets, they trail a dispersal of attention behind them that nonetheless assembles into a coda, something visible."
Helen Vendler, The New York Review of Books