Publisher's Synopsis
To mark John Ashbery's seventieth birthday, Carcanet publish his first five books of poems in a single volume. Much of this work has never been published in full in Britain, most of it -- apart from poems included in his 1985 Selected Poems -- has been unavailable for years. To have the full text of The Tennis Court Oath (1962) alongside Some Trees (1956, selected by W.H.Auden for the Yale Younger Poets series, described by Frank O'Hara as `the most beautiful first book to appear in America since Wallace Stevens' Harmonium), shows just how rapidly, and with what authority, Ashbery found his own way. Rivers and Mountains (1966), The Double Dream of Spring (1970, with which British readers first made his acquaintance a couple of years later) and Three Poems (1972), one of his most innovative works, complete what is in effect the Collected Early Poems.
