The Mooring of Starting Out

The Mooring of Starting Out demonstrates the early bravado and extraordinary development of one of America's most important contemporary poets. Spanning the first sixteen years of Ashbery's career, this volume begins with the stunning first collection, Some Trees (1956), which was chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets and hailed by Frank O'Hara as "the most beautiful first book since Wallace Stevens's Harmonium." This is followed by The Tennis Court Oath (1962) and Rivers and Mountains (1967), a National Book Award finalist. From the seventies, comes the lyrical The Double Dream of Spring (1970), and the highly idiosyncratic and much admired prose poetry of Three Poems (1972).