Can You Hear, Bird

More about the book

After John Ashberry's Flow Chart (1991), Hotel Lautreamont (1992) and And the Stars were Shining (1994), this work provides an A-Y of poems, moments in which voices, images and tones come in for his attention. The poems are generally short, except for T when Tuesday Evening occurs. The poem begins in tight rhymed quatrains; as the evening extends, the verse relaxes to elicit and swallow up more and more, until only rhyme pins together the impulse and reflection. Ashberry's imagination remains subject to time's encroachment and the heart's vagaries.