Your Name Here: Poems

In his twentieth collection of poetry, John Ashbery continues to examine the themes that have preoccupied him of late: age and its inevitable losses, memories of childhood, the transforming magic of dreams in daily living. "Why do I tell you these things? You are not even here," he asks in the opening poem, seemingly addressed to an absent friend. Fortunately, he finds plenty of reasons to "tell things," chief among them the pleasure of attempting to offer the reader "a completely new set of objects," in Wallace Stevens's phrase. Through a blizzard of conflicting styles and tones of voice, the poems take shape as though through an iridescent shower of snow in a shaken paperweight.

Your Name Here (a title suggested by bullfight posters hawked to tourists in Spain, with a blank space so they can fill in their own name as terero) offers souvenirs to the reader, inviting him or her to "personalize" the poems with their own associations and memories.

After his take on kids' adventure stories in his Girls on the Run (FSG, 1999), Ashbery returns to and renews his own masterful voice in this sad, funny, and beautiful book.