There’s a generous measure of fun in the title poem of Ashbery’s latest collection, but the American poet also plays hide and seek with violence and disconnection
Someone said we needed a breezeway
to bark down remnants of super storm Elias jugularly.
Alas it wasn’t my call.
I didn’t have a call or anything resembling one.
You see I have always been a rather dull-spirited winch.
The days go by and I go with them.
A breeze falls from a nearby tower,
finds no breezeway, goes away
along a mission to supersize red shutters.
The amused impatience of the poem swells into allegory, pushing beyond the parochial towards the chiliastic
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