About this ebook
In Ashbery's 1987 collection, ballads, folklore, and fairy tales mesh with the anxieties and idioms of modern life
For a book by one of the leading avant-garde poets of modern literature, John Ashbery's April Galleons is suffused with voices from the past. There are echoes of the Romantics in the elegiac "A Mood of Quiet Beauty" and "Vetiver," allusions to ballads and folkloric epics in "Finnish Rhapsody" and "Forgotten Song," and veiled references to legends, folk songs, and fairy tales. But as always with Ashbery, the modern world is the microphone through which these past voices are made to speak, amplified and invigorated by Ashbery's signature wit and generosity of spirit.
A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year in which it was first published, April Galleons is a must-read collection from a notable period in John Ashbery's long and lauded career.
For a book by one of the leading avant-garde poets of modern literature, John Ashbery's April Galleons is suffused with voices from the past. There are echoes of the Romantics in the elegiac "A Mood of Quiet Beauty" and "Vetiver," allusions to ballads and folkloric epics in "Finnish Rhapsody" and "Forgotten Song," and veiled references to legends, folk songs, and fairy tales. But as always with Ashbery, the modern world is the microphone through which these past voices are made to speak, amplified and invigorated by Ashbery's signature wit and generosity of spirit.
A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year in which it was first published, April Galleons is a must-read collection from a notable period in John Ashbery's long and lauded career.
In Ashbery's 1987 collection, ballads, folklore, and fairy tales mesh with the anxieties and idioms of modern life
For a book by one of the leading avant-garde poets of modern literature, John Ashbery's April Galleons is suffused with voices from the past. There are echoes of the Romantics in th...
About the author
John Ashbery was born in 1927 in Rochester, New York, and grew up on a farm near Lake Ontario. He authored more than thirty books of poetry, fiction, drama, and criticism, his work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages, and he won numerous American literary awards for his poetry, including a MacArthur Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and a National Humanities Medal. His book Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. For many years, Ashbery taught graduate and undergraduate poetry courses at Brooklyn College and Bard College, and his most recent book of poems is Quick Question, published in 2012.
John Ashbery was born in 1927 in Rochester, New York, and grew up on a farm near Lake Ontario. He authored more than thirty books of poetry, fiction, drama, and criticism, his work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages, and he won numerous American literary awards for his poetr...
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