JOHN ASHBERY AND AMERICAN POETRY

In the poetry trade, what often unites the dullest "workshop" conservative and the wildest experimentalist is a shared regard for the poems of Ashbery, even if they are often different poems. But what also unites every reader of Ashbery is the mystery of how his singular achievement came to be, of how the poet developed and sustained a body of work at once so intimate and unknowable. A lecturer in English and French literature at the University of Kent, Herd, in his extraordinarily lucid and jargon-free monograph, is smart enough not to attempt a definitive answer to such questions, but his command of the materials that prompt the questions can only illuminate numerous aspects of Ashbery's long and complex career. Herd's basic thesis—that Ashbery's ambition is to write a poem "fit for its occasion," in which the writer and reader (and speaker, as well) come "face to face with the now in which everything must happen"—is convincing, but the strength of the book is that he doesn't keep hammering away at it. Herd's "close readings" are just that, never straying pointlessly far from the poems in question, but always alive to their paradoxes. Likewise, Herd's use of secondary sources, including input from such pivotal but nowadays rarely cited figures as Paul Goodman, Philip Rahv and C. Wright Mills, is always at the service of understanding. Like all good criticism, this book sends the reader eagerly back to the works in question; it would be a shame if it were read only in academia, for it has much to offer any reader interested in the recent history of American poetry. (Sept.)