Review by Booklist Review
For many years Ashbery was an art critic as well as a poet, and he has always sought to wed the visual with the verbal, a quest that led to this book-length poem inspired by the strange creations of "outsider" artist Henry Darger (1872-1972). A recluse with a history of mental illness and an obsession with little girls, Darger filled his Chicago apartment with his life work, a 19,000-page illustrated epic titled "The Story of the Vivian Girls in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal." Ashbery has captured the peculiar energy of Darger's disturbing creation, conjuring an imagined world in which the cloying vies with the menacing, the prosaic with the mythic. This is a virtuoso interpretative performance, but it also stands as a wistful dramatization of how life goes on during war and mayhem, that within any given moment things shift from dark to light, feral to civilized, good to evil as we dash about at the mercy of powers we can only attempt to fathom. (Reviewed March 15, 1999)0374162700Donna Seaman
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This beautiful long poem presents Ashbery at his most contradictory: it is both his most Homeric and "narrative" long poem, yet at the same time his most joissant, collage-based work in years. It borrows from the imagery of Henry Darger (1892-1972), an American "outsider" artist who devoted decades to a mammoth, illustrated novel about the plight of the fictional "Vivian" girls. Ashbery's adaptation follows the adventures of dozens of characters with names like Pliable, Bunny, Mr. McPlaster, Uncle Margaret, and FredÄrecalling "Farm Implements and Rutabegas in Landscape," Ashbery's talismanic Popeye riff from the '70s. The sentences are often short, somewhat "off" ("Trevor his dog came, half jumping."), and they set up deeply bizarre narrative situations: "Hold it, I have an idea, Fred groaned. Now some of you, five at least, must go over in that little shack./ I'll follow with the tidal waves, and see what happens next." Classic Surrealism erupts frequently in well-timed bursts: "The tame suburban landscape excited him./ He had met his match./ Dimples replaced the mollusk with shoe-therapy." Elsewhere, Ashbery jibes obliquely at the epic tradition, laconically laying down the blandest of similes with pseudo-stentorian bluster, while at other moments the meditative, universal Ashberian persona breaks through, with apt sophistication and terrible humanist relevance: "The oblique flute sounded its note of resin./ In time, he said, we all go under the fluted covers/ of this great world, with its spiral dissonances,/ and then we can see, on the other side,/ what the rascals are up to." More memory than dreamÄthe never-was memory of constant companionship, of "fun," of names that resonate with mystery (even "Fred")Äthe poem recalls a land that was never boring and whose physical environment, while somewhat foreboding, was as safe as the womb and as colorful as Oz. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Inspired by the work of Henry Dargeran obscure illustrator who spent decades writing a juvenile adventure novel in which young heroines, the Vivians, face a multitude of pulp dangersAshberys 20th work of poetry is a playful romp. A large cast of childrens book charactersTidbit, Rags the Dog, Mr. McPlastertalk around, meditate through, and abruptly disappear from what is essentially a sustained sequence of colorful non sequiturs artfully connected by Ashberys affable syntax, as in this busy passage: Under frozen mounds of yak butter the graffiti have their day, and are elaborate/ some say. Nobody wants to go there. Yes, she said, we will swim/ there if necessary. The arroz con pollo can take us/ and do with us what we will. And so on in the fractured spirit of Lewis Carroll, recalling just how surreal our childhood worldsthe ones we invented with the help of fictionreally were. But while Ashbery can make us forget how serious we are while planting unexpected land mines of metaphysical pizzazz within the daffiness, his hectic wordplay eventually invites tedium.Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Ashbery dips his bucket into the well for his 19th volume, and emerges with a book-length poem inspired by the lusty dreamlike work of ``outsider'' artist Henry Darger. While the poem resembles a story, full of figures of fun like Dimples, Jane, Persnickety, and others with prurient appellations, Girls on the Run is a nonstory. Rather, it's a jubilantly mannerist series of occasions. Events happen: ``Hungeringly, Tidbit approached the crone who held the bowl, / . . . . drank the honey. It had good things about it. / Now, pretty as a moment, / Tidbit's housecoat sniffed the indecipherable.'' Meta-commentary, which describes the poem's total aesthetic, accompanies these happenings. For example, ``See, they need to have a storyline. Sexy. So it appears. / The seven colors are remanded.'' As in his last volume, Wakefulness, this latest poem is far from autumnal. It's an unexpected supreme collection, a surrealist comic effort with panel after panel of loopy, glorious lines: ``Slush and feathers. The hippo trod on a pine needle, they all sank back into relief / Everywhere we go is something to eat / and fat disappointment, tears in the rain. Somebody is coming over the radio. / A lull.''; ``Sometimes they were in sordid situations; / at others, a smidgen of fun would intrude on our day, / which exists to be intruded upon anyway.'' As vital, rambunctious, inventive, and outsiderish as ever.
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