The commotion of fifty-five new poems: Ashbery at his most vertiginous, witty, irresistible. 'And the tenses, unstable, invite the past to move in on the present and future.'

Commotion of the Birds

John Ashbery

CARCANET PRESS PN REVIEW

Moss is oceanic: his poems rise, crest, crash, and rise again like waves. His voice echoes the boom of the Old Testament, the fluty trill of Greek mythology, and the gongs of Chinese rituals as he writes about love, nature, war, oppression, and the miracle of language. He addresses the God of the Jews, of the Christians, and of the Muslims with awe and familiarity, and chants to lesser gods of his own invention. In every surprising poem, every song to life, beautiful life, Moss, by turns giddy and sorrowful, expresses a sacred sensuality and an earthy holiness. Or putting it another way: here is a mind operating in open air, unimpeded by fashion or forced thematic focus, profoundly catholic in perspective, at once accessible and erudite, inevitably compelling. All of which is to recommend Mosss ability to participate in and control thoroughly these poems while resisting the impulse to center himself in them. This differentiates his beautiful work from much contemporary breast-beating. Moss is an artist who embraces the possibilities of exultation, appreciation, reconciliation, of extreme tenderness. As such he lays down a commitment to a common, worldly morality toward which all beings gravitate.

Almost Complete Poems

Literature & Fiction

Stanley Moss

Poetry

City Gate, Open Up is the lyrical autobiography of China's a memoir legendary poet Bei Dao. Exiled from Beijing in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, Bei Dao returned to his homeland in 2001 for the first time in over twenty years. The city of his youth had vanished: 'I was a foreigner in my hometown,' he writes. The shock of this experience released a flood of memories and emotions contained in City Gate, Open Up.The poet recalls the Beijing of his youth, from the birth of the People's Republic, through the chaotic years of the Great Leap Forward, and on into the Cultural Revolution. At the centre of the book are his parents and siblings and their everyday life together through famine and festival. Bei Dao's autobiography is a memory palace of endless alleyways and corridors, where personal narrative mixes with the momentous history he lived through.

City Gate, Open Up

Biographies & Memoirs

Bei Dao Translated by Jeffrey Yang

Arts & Literature

Fast

Jorie Graham

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