Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

by John Ashbery

Overview

John Ashbery’s most renowned collection of poetry — Winner of The Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award 

First released in 1975, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror is today regarded as one of the most important collections of poetry published in the last fifty years.  Not only in the title poem, which the critic John Russell  called “one of the finest long poems of our period,” but throughout the entire volume, Ashbery reaffirms the poetic power that made him an outstanding figure in contemporary literature.  These are poems “of breathtaking freshness and adventure in which dazzling orchestrations of language open up whole areas of consciousness no other American poet as ever begun to explore” (The New York Times).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780140586688
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/01/1990
Series:	Penguin Poets
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	96
Sales rank:	376,283
Product dimensions:	5.47(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.26(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

John Ashbery (1927 – 2017) was the author of more than twenty-five collections of poetry, including Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award;  Selected Poems (1985); and Selected Later Poems (2007), which was awarded the 2008 International Griffin Poetry Prize. Ashbery’s honors included a MacArthur Fellowship and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Foundation in 2011.

Table of Contents

Self-Portrait in a Convex MirrorAs One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat
Worsening Situation
Forties Flick
As You Came from the Holy Land
A Man of Words
Scheherazade
Absolute Clearance
Grand Galop
Poem in Three Parts
Voyage in the Blue
Farm
Farm II
Farm III
Hop o' My Thumb
De Imagine Mundi
Foreboding
The Tomb of Stuart Merrill
Tarpaulin
River
Mixed Feelings
The One Thing That Can Save America
Tenth Symphony
On Autumn Lake
Fear of Death
Ode to Bill
Lithuanian Dance Band
Sand Pail
No Way of Knowing
Suite
Märchenbilder
City Afternoon
Robin Hood's Barn
All and Some
Oleum Misericordiae
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

Editorial Reviews

"No one now writing poetry in the English language is likelier than Ashbery to survive the severe judgments of time. . . . He is joining that American sequence that includes Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, and Hart Crane." —Harold Bloom

"Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror is certainly one of the most sustained performances in American writing. . . . John Ashbery, more than any other contemporary, is the poet of the momentary, the transitory. This preoccupation animates everything he writes, and what he writes is some of the best poetry of our day." —The Washington Post

"Ashbery is astonishingly original, and though his mannerisms have been widely imitated, he himself has imitated no one." —Edmund White

"A style devoid of pretension and a beautiful ease of manner that is rarely less than enchanting . . . There is no one who writes quite like Ashbery, and the poetic territory he inhabits is very much his own." —Paul Auster

From the Publisher

"In the pages of an art journal some years ago, John Ashbery wrote: "Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibilities that they are founded on nothing." Ashbery's own kind of recklessness takes the form of an austere refusal to honor any of the claims of sentiment, beauty and good conscience that poetry is supposed to make." Books of the Century, the New York Times, August, 1975

John Malclom Brinin