Hotel Lautreamont (1992)

Critics, scholars, students, and other readers of contemporary poetry have long appreciated Ashbery's uncanny mastery of the cadence and lyricism of colloquial speech, but they have been less sensitive to the equally important influences in his work of such "outsider" French poets as Arthur Rimbaud, Raymond Roussel, and Isidore Ducasse (a/k/a Count de Lautréamont). These sometimes overlooked presences are wonderfully alive in this collection of lyric poems, which first appeared in 1992. Now back in print, Hotel Lautréamont underscores Ashbery's ability to be both tragic and playful, dense and volatile, passionate and impersonal. As David Herd observed in New Statesman and Society, this is "a poetry fully and startlingly engaged with the way things happen."