Alan Davies Writes Through Ashbery's A Worldly Country

New at Jacket2: Alan Davies writes about John Ashbery's 2007 book, A Worldly Country. "His poems are not objects — they are rather more like a plasma," writes Davies. True to form, Davies's review reads like a poem itself. An excerpt:

The poems provide rather a nice place in which to go to sleep. Critics of this work have sort of moved in / and furnished the walls of the poem (soft and deep as dream itself) with their own ideas — and then (and only then) / taken those ideas to be the ideas of the poems themselves — it is not difficult to see to what an extent / or in what ways / this activity is bound to be boundlessly pleasing to the critics thus engaged (what self-affirmation! / at the expense of the little that was really there [ if it was ]).  

There are / as it turns out / lines that appear to have the metaphysical about them (if not to be actually about [ about ] the metaphysical) — but the metaphysical / even the metaphysical / is rather long-gone from the scene — what we are experiencing is (instead) its echo / or the echo of its aura / or the scratching it made on the sides of nothing as it went. And always this evasiveness — this massive evasiveness. 
          Can we say that it is about what can’t be said? — can we say that? No — we can’t say that. It is about / if it is about anything / itself — it is round and about itself (but most often / not even quite that / not even quite there).  

Much will be forgiven those
on whom nothing has dawned. (8)

At least there’s nothing here to stir anyone up / or to get them to do anything (!). It’s all rather more like a massage (if that) / a massage for some phantom pain (if that).  

                     We could ignore the warning signs,
but should we? Should we all? Perhaps we should. (9) 

In the interstices / things do get said — mostly about the interstices / as if only the gaps between what matters matter. This offers a kind of comfort / particularly to those who don’t know / to those who don’t want to know / and particularly to those of them who are satisfied with that...

Read the full review at Jacket2.