BOOKS
161
the dreamt Upended in a puddle somewhere/ As though 'dead' were
just another adjective ." This poem indicates something of the com–
plexity of Ashbery's enterprise, the more than thirty years of testing
the cobwebs which link word to unspeakable reality . It indicates also
the poignancy of the task, since death does lie beneath utterance,
giving it both the lie and the truth: it inhabits the blank spaces be–
tween stanzas, the monstrously indefinite pronouns of
A Wave .
Selected Poems
in no way purports to present a whole
oeuvre.
It
catches the poet in mid-flight; while its exclusions may facilitate ac–
cess for new readers by clearing away tedious and overwritten pas–
sages , it omits crucial poems from nearly all the volumes, most note–
worthily from
The Double Dream of Spring
which is a beautiful entity ,
from
Three Poems ,
and from
As We Know.
It
does grant the occasion,
however, to take stock.
The remarkable book
Some Trees,
which appeared in 1956 sub–
suming much of the earlier
Turandot and Other Poems,
established Ash–
bery's essential features. Its first poem, "Two Scenes," opened with a
militant claim to vision : "We see us as we truly behave:/ From every
corner comes a distinctive offering."
If
the declaration was Roman–
tic, its accepted banality of phrase and surrealist juxtapositions were
distinctly anti-Sublime: "For long we hadn't heard so much news,
such noise.! The day was warm and pleasant.! . . . We see you in the
tips of your hair,! Air resting around the tips of mountains." Its syn–
tactic, semantic, and narrative derangements announce the Ashbery
to come, a poet whose prophecy lies behind the veil of Isis: "In the
evening/ Everything has a schedule, if you can find out what it is."
If
Some Trees
was something of a manifesto of subversion, it also
showed a poet tactfully engaged with his tradition. In the poem
"Some Trees," a beguiling syntax twines through rhyming tetram–
eter quatrains as it explores the distance
Joining
imagination and
world: "And glad not to have invented! Such comeliness, we are sur–
rounded:/ A silence already filled with noises,! A canvas on which
emerges// A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.! Placed in a puz–
zling light, and moving,! Our days put on such reticence/ These ac–
cents seem their own defense." Other poems from the same volume
accept those conditions of polysemy and mystery with equal chastity:
"And only in the light of lost words/ Can we imagine our rewards."
("Picture of little
J.
A. in a Prospect of Flowers").
But, Ashbery declares elsewhere, "Much that is beautiful must
be discarded! So that we may resemble a taller// version of ourselves
..." From book to book he disrupts his poise and performs more and
