Can You Hear, Bird

A 1995 collection of poems that finds John Ashbery at his most conversational, funny, and surprising In Can You Hear, Bird , John Ashbery’s seventeenth collection, language is both a plaything and a sandbox. The poems are arranged not in the order of their composition but alphabetically, by the first letter in their titles, like the neatly arrayed keys of some fabulous Seussical instrument. In line after line, Ashbery demonstrates his alertness to language as it is spoken, heard, broadcast, and