A Poet in Winter

Where Shall I Wander
New Poems
by John Ashbery
Ecco / HarperCollins, 81 pp., $22.95

EVERY BIOGRAPHICAL ENTRY FOR JOHN Ashbery includes the name of W.H. Auden. It was Auden who gave the newcomer's career a powerful send-off when he selected his second book of poems, Some Trees, for the Yale Younger Poets Series. Twenty-three collections of poetry and five decades later, the younger poet has grown gray, but the same question of 1956 is asked in 2005. The cadences and wordplay delight, but do the poems make any sense?

William Arrowsmith, neither sharing Auden's high estimation of the younger poet's talents nor joining the general chorus of praise for Some Trees, simply couldn't make heads or tails of it. "What," he maintained, "does come through is an impression of an impossibly fractured world, depersonalized and discontinuous, whose characteristic emotional gesture is an effete and cerebral whimsy."

With his latest collection, Where Shall I Wander, some moments call Arrowsmith's judgment to mind or, to borrow the question posed by another exegete, "Kenneth, what is the frequency?" The words breeze by in a chatty stream of consciousness, and a line in this volume--"Sometimes I think it's all one big affectation"--may prompt readers to nod in agreement. Or: Yes, I / can think of a number of things which would surprise you if you knew / the soundtrack. Where might we find it? As readers familiar with Ashbery might expect, there are also times his wordplay becomes too cute, as when he'll "render unto caesura," though I have to admit to a guilty pleasure in such verbal frolicking.

And yet these missteps do not accurately epitomize his latest outing. These are the fine-tuned poems of an old man, even if we can't hum unfailingly along with the soundtrack. At 77, Ashbery remains playful and even whimsical. But a haunting quality pervades the collection. We listen as the speaking voice sifts through memories, trying to make sense of what happened. All the while present and past refuse to remain still, and the voice grapples with that perennial theme of life and, thus, literature and mutability.

For / time, and this is where it gets really nasty, he writes in the title poem "Where Shall I Wander," remembers all of us, / recognizes us making allowances for our changed appearances and greets / us familiarly by name, only occasionally mixed up ( thought it / does happen). In those mix-ups, the present is likely to affix itself to reveries of the past in curious ways: So who's to blame us for signing off on our agenda and / sinking into a cozy chair, accepting the proffered sherry and sighing for / a time when things really were easier and more people were alive. That, / and Jack's tattoo.

The old saw has it that wisdom comes with age. Here, too, Ashbery doesn't disappoint, as we come upon lines brimming with insight, The ocean filling in for us. Too many / vacant noon empires, without them you can't rule a hemisphere or be sated other than watching. Our TV brains sit around us all brave / and friendly, like docile pets. We get by by tweaking. This damning aphorism is so true that, perhaps, a successful life can be measured by how much distance we put between it and ourselves.

Ashbery's "Lost Footage" provides a telling and powerful sampling of the volume.

The curving path escorts us to Armida's pavilion. The enchantress. She had everything built slightly smaller than life size, as you'll find if you sit in the chair at that table.

No matter how old we are, the child in us never goes away, that awkward self, when things are too big and soon our old things too small. Our memories are similar. Do we still fit them? Do they fit us?

We can't mask the anxiety for long, but we can produce good and cherishable deeds to be ransacked by those who come after us. True, no one visits anymore. I used to think it was because of him, now I think it's because of him and us. We grow more fragile at our posts, interrogating vacant night. "Who goes there?" And he goes, "Nay, stand and unfurl yourself." I thought, in the corner, in the canyon, in the cupboard, was something that seized me in a terrible but approachable embrace.

Who we are and who we've been can seem terrible, measured against who we wanted to be, and they close upon us as though we are trapped in a corner, a canyon, or a cupboard. Still, all this has to be approachable. What other option is there in the vacant night with nothing to distract us?

Even though these poems clearly are through the eyes of an aged man, they never stoop to a confessional moan. It may be the very fuzziness of some of the images, as they go in and out of focus, which distances us from the overly personal. Our attention, instead, is drawn to the mountain peaks, the contours of the memories, the occasional oddity, and, as readers, we're richer for the experience.

It is fitting for a poet of Ashbery's stature to include poems on poetry. In "Sonnet: More of Same," I suppose we could say he's waving his flag when there's little of a sonnet to be found: Try to avoid the pattern that has been avoided, / the avoidance pattern. But there's more to this poem. It speaks to why readers (as well they should) pick up Where Shall I Wander--or any poem, for that matter. It's like practicing a scale: At once different and never the same. / Ask not why we do these things. Ask why we find them meaningful. / Ask the cuckoo transfixed in mid-flight / between the pagoda and the hermit's rococo cave.

R. Andrew Newman writes and teaches English in Nebraska.