POETRY

HOTEL LAUTREAMONT by John Ashbery (Alfred A. Knopf: $23; 168 pp.) The title of this new collection (due out later this month) from a great master refers to the pseudonymous Count de Lautreamont, a 19th-Century poet about whom little is known save that he spent his brief adult life in various hotels in Paris, and died in 1870 at the age of 24. As a jumping off point, the image of this young poet’s transient life, frozen in history, permeates the book. The language is ever so slightly disjointed and cinematic, and Ashbery refers often to loose connections and broken lines of communication: “As it is I frequently get off before the stop that is mine/ not out of modesty but a failure to keep the lines of communication/ open within myself. And then, unexpectedly, I am shown a dog and asked to summarize its position in a few short, angular adverbs/ and tell them this is what they do, why we can’t count/ on anything unexpected.” It’s as though Ashbery were pondering the order of things, questioning the perspective of history with the tone of some vague ruler sweeping her hand across the landscape. Images and ideas crash together “like a/ twenty-one-vehicle pileup on a fog-enclosed highway./ This is what it means to be off and running, off/ one’s nut as well. But in a few more years,/ with time off for good behavior. . .” Reading the poems straight through is a little like having many conversations at a party, some of them important.