Still Time for Surprises

STILL TIME FOR SURPRISES

published in Thumbscrew, 18 (Spring 2001): 46-48.

John Ashbery: Your Name Here. Manchester: Carcanet. £7.95

David Herd. John Ashbery and American Poetry. Manchester: Manchester University Press. £45.00.

* * *For the past decade, John Ashbery has been producing a new book of poems almost every year—a situation that, for just about any other poet, would signify excess. Can the lyric poet, one wonders, continue to produce at this rate?