A Worldly Country by John Ashbery

This is the kind of poetry I don't understand. The kind that spouts words and phrases and creates pictures, one by one. They flash by too quickly, so you never really grasp what the author is trying to say. You know that they must be connected somehow, but you can never really figure out how.

This drives me crazy!

There were a few poems I responded to. "Ukase" was my favorite, oddly enough. Or maybe not so oddly. Look it up in a dictionary--it all makes sense.

From the beginning, when "the word rabbits came hippity-hopping along," I knew that I had found something that was going to make sense to me. I read it through once, then twice, and I started to understand.

"The weary river" asking "the same song" leads into molding "the analytical to the time-sensitive" and "we were no worse for it." This is clearly talking about the repetition of work. A life full of work, which is as it should be because "we were no worse for it."

Then he says that it's time to pack up, to get ready to leave. For "we are incurably, undeniably aging." But he doesn't want to come to that end yet. He isn't ready and he isn't ready for his partner to be ready. It's "not when, but if." And the poem ends with recognition that this will be gradual and they will recognize it "from the way we look at each other."

If you got all that, you might like this book of poetry. If you're thinking, "I hate it when she reviews poems," you probably won't.

~6/10~