That Carbonating Fizz

This week, The Lyre hails a new poet. The last time we read about John Ashbery in the London Review of Cakes -- our one-stop-shop for all that's happening in contemporary poetry -- his most recent volume, Planisphere, was being packed off in a stairlift by young Michael Robbins:

Forever bowled over by the same old thing, finding difference in repetition, Ashbery is the Duracell bunny of American poetry.

The bunny is getting rather long in the tooth – Ashbery turned 83 in July – and he has been writing the same book for more than 15 years. Each new model struts gorgeously down the runway, a bit aloof, a bit silly, and the critics can’t tell them apart. 

This is great criticism, and will no doubt have saved many readers the hassle of enjoying 'language art at its finest' in Planisphere itself. 'Ashbery’s singular achievement', as Robbins says, 'is to have made his strangeness so familiar'.

Who, then, is the upstart in this month's PN Review, offering seven new poems under the same name, all of which seem to assert 'there's not enough strangeness / in the world, only damper pedals seething?' The Lyre can't recall anything quite like this in the Bunny's recent output:

... And over and behind it all the old shade,
as deleted as a Chinese risk factor. Oh, say,
all along the way it turned into light. Was supple.

Without that carbonating fizz his self-deprecating
gambit fell into shards like patterned shawls, are to this day.

Or, indeed, a line like this:

My real-time dappled logic wanted to apologise.

Evidently, the batteries have been transferred to a new model. Long may its coppertop alkaline continue to spark.