Stuart Walton

A Master of Human Intricacies

The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life, Karin Roffman, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, June 2017, 316 pp., £23.00 (Hardback)

Collected Poems 1991-2000, John Ashbery, edited by Mark Ford, Carcanet, January 2018, 840 pp., £20.00 (Paperback)

Commotion of the Birds: New Poems, John Ashbery, Carcanet, November 2016, 74 pp., £9.99 (Paperback)

‘What do you want, John?’ the elderly poet quizzes himself, and without pausing for so much as a line break, goes on to supply a couple of answers. ‘Informally, a / new body, and an assistant’ (‘Understandably’). Within touching distance of ninety, amid the teeming and looming of the sensible world he has been addressing since his mid-teens, there is so much to recall, if one can recall it. ‘Did we once go to bed together? / And how was it? I need your help on this one’ (‘The Upright Piano’). At the wintry end of life, the sensible comes adrift in painful ways from its mediation by thought. ‘Intelligence without understanding / is like constant frost, pounding at the temples / until its bargain is overseen. I kid you not.’ As the Preacher taught, there is a season for every activity under the heavens, a truth seen all the more clearly in the sunlit prism of retrospection: ‘What was it about those boys? Some were plain, / some were smooth. All enjoyed the sun / for as long as it chose to shine upon them.’

John Ashbery’s twenty-seventh collection of poetry, Commotion of the Birds, turned out to be his last complete book. That it should have preceded the first volume of his biography by Yale academic Karin Roffman, The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life, seems to mark an all too neat borderline between his creative output and what promises to be a sedulously detailed chronicle of his life. These details, retrieved from