John Ash Selected Works

For those interested in a deeper appreciation of the Byzantine Empire and its importance to world history, this engaging, richly detailed travelogue introduces a colorful cast of personalities from the region's fascinating history and provides a detailed description of the art and influences of the time.

Istanbul—a place that is both exotic and familiar, spanning west and east, past and present—is fully explored in this collection of poetry that sketches out its many faces. Memories, cultures, and histories intersect in these poems that arch from imaginings of contemporary Turkey and trace back along a journey to Antioch. With characteristic playfulness, sophistication, and savage wit, this sojourn delves into what it means to be a part of a culture and to celebrate what is loved and ultimately unknowable.

This work draws on John Ash's four collections and is virtually a Collected Poems. Among contemporary British poets he is known for his wit, formal ambition and his Byzantine range.

In The Anatolikon, Ash's deep knowledge of Byzantine and Ottoman cultures, as well as his daily life, informs poems that somehow still reflect his awareness of Western poetics and experimentation.

John Ash's second collection brings together new poems, his pamphlet Casino, his Oasis Books volume The Bed, and "Epitaph for the Greeks in India." The poems consider nightlife, music, death, nature, civilization, emotions, and the imagination.

Ash's first collection. From the back cover: "Sonatas. Rain. Musical animals. Angels. Braided Intersections. Architraves. Cracked, black glass. Office buildings in sunsets. Those puppet theatres you used to be able to make up from the backs of breakfast cereal packets, but with a generous selection of well-designed backdrops in colours guaranteed not to fade. Sexual encounters in modernized fairy-tales. Science fiction and disguised nostalgia. Some portraits: an ancient debutante, a young dead poet, the murdered favourite of a Chinese emperor. Music, not painting, as paradigm. A divertimento in three parts. Large rhythmic units, not 'metrically exact lines', not iambics except as ancestral ghosts. Developments in remote keys. Variations with the 'theme' well concealed. Television soap-operas viewed as hallucinations. The sadness of old dance tunes. Urban pastorals. Fake ruins. Conversations, not sermons. Lyricism, not messages. The image of a better world presented without false optimism."

With witty wordplay and evocative language, this new poetry collection portrays Istanbul, the poet’s home city, as a crossroads of culture on par with any international capital. The oddities of place and people lead readers away from the mundane and immerse them in an unfamiliar yet humane culture that the West is veering nearer to regarding as irrevocably “other.”

An Englishman who has lived in both New York and Istanbul, John Ash is one of the great masters of poetic clarity. His books on the Byzantine world and ancient Anatolia are widely admired for their elegance and candor. "These poems believe intensely in the world they bear witness to. So vividly do they believe in the happenstance they behold that at times they go for quiet, unemphatic ways of talking, perfectly registered" — Rain Taxi.