FLOW CHART

First UK edition, first printing. Signed by the author. Publisher's original blue cloth with gilt titles to the spine, in dustwrapper. A near fine copy, the binding square and firm with a little bumping and a small nick at the base of the spine, the cloth and gilt bright and fresh. The contents are clean throughout and without previous owners' inscriptions or stamps. Complete with the bright original dustwrapper that has a small nick and some creasing at the base of the spine, and is otherwise without fading, loss or tears. Not price-clipped (£16.95 to the lower front flap).

In 1987, Ashbery's friend, the artist Trevor Winkfield, suggested to the poet that he write a one-hundred-page poem about his mother, who had recently died. Ashbery, according to John Shoptaw, later "recalled thinking, 'Say, that's something I haven't done before!', hasten[ing] to add, 'of course, it's not about my mother'". 'Flow Chart', Ashbery's longest single poem, was indeed originally written as a one-hundred-page, single-spaced typescript (this framework was deliberately obscured in the published version). Beginning on December 8, 1987, the poet decided in advance to finish the one hundred pages on July 28, 1988, his sixty-first birthday. An oblique elegy (complementing the earlier fifty-dizain 'Fragment' written in the wake of his father's death), the poem is also capacious and brimming with life, its long Whitman-esque lines exploiting the full span of the volume's large quarto pages. The poem has been compared to Wordsworth's 'Prelude', and the first page's "emptiness / so sudden it leaves the girders / whanging in the absence of wind" may recall the "gentle breeze" fanning Wordsworth's cheek having "escaped / [...] the vast city" (Ashbery, though, remains "in the published city", charting the flow). 'Flow Chart' is dedicated to Ashbery's bibliographer, lover, and eventually husband, David Kermani. (John Shoptaw, 'On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery's Poetry' [Cambridge, MA: 1995].