Can You Hear, Bird

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. Ashberry was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award for "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" (1975).