Selected By Toh Hsien Min

Carcanet are to be congratulated on producing a particularly beautiful and useful book in The Mooring of Starting Out, to which new readers are directed.

Given the tooth-grinding torpor much of it induces, the title (changed in the proofs from The Whispering Gallery) seems like a hostage to fortune.  To mix metaphors like Ashbery, much of the book is a desert of local, wilful ingenuity across which the poet can be heard nattering on and habitually juxtaposing until the reader finds himself abandoning equipment - rifle, boots, water-bottle - and running for the horizon as delirium sets in.

...there is rarely any ordinary human sense of having begun somewhere in particular and being likely to end up somewhere else, too.  This is a condition of the instability of identity which has been spoken of as one of his concerns, but in the latest book it comes with a lack of the dialectical friction which could make the flow of things dramatically compelling for the reader whose sense of the world is not the same as the poet's.

Ashbery for the most part ignores his admirable gift for exploiting the contrast between disparate or peculiar materials and assured, elegant, extensive sentences, something he has possessed since "The Instruction Manual" in his first book Some Trees (1956).

You could argue that the monotony is of a particularly American sort - teeming and "ungovernable" - an imperial monotony which, in its Tiggerish energy - comes to seem somewhat oppressive.  Life is strange, multiple, subject to instant revision, the poems suggest - but this has become an assumption rather than a stimulus, and the effect here is sometimes like what in primary school used to be called "copying out", or, come to think of it, as if the poet had been punished by being given lines.  He has suffered for his art, and now it seems to be our turn.

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