'Little by little the idea of the true way returned to me,' John Ashbery writes early in his new collection. Each sense is wakened up. So are all the spirits. Many whispers, voices chantant dans la coupole: passions, leaves, loves, flutes, insects, paintings, apologies, partings. We are in history, and in the present, too - in buildings, churches, homes, cars and trains, making our way to Baltimore and Bucharest, to the zoo, the park, the future.
The poems have a confession they can't quite bring themselves to make, apologies that can't quite pin themselves down. Ashbery's digressions are wily, heartbreaking or vertiginous. There are departures, fears of departure, and the fact of time: time versus the heart's vagaries and the curiosities of eye and ear. The search for epiphanies continues, the clock ticks.

'In his seventies John Ashbery offers a sprightly and energetic alternative. Instead of being sluggish he demands that the self must be even more alert, more vigilant, more attentive to the world around it, not indifferent to and weary of it. Alert, vigilant, attentive ... Wakefulness, the brilliantly evocative title of Ashbery's collection.'
Stephen Matterson, 'The Capacious Art of Poetry,' Poetry Ireland Review 62, 114

"Wakefulness is as nuanced, subtle, and magnificent as Stevens's late poems in The Rock. The book is a profound pleasure, the gift of a master."
(Harold Bloom)
"In a poem called 'Shadows in the Street' in Wakefulness, John Ashbery fleetingly depicts someone "mad and absorber / by life, by the truth, as always". This could easily stand for the poet himself. Now over 70, Ashbery is still exuberantly dedicated to the truthful rendering of experience as a flow of sensations that defy interpretation. Consciousness is not so much a stream as a series of jump-cuts from one haunting or zany impression to the next. His best poems have a weirdly, intriguingly satisfying quality...
However one reads it, Wakefulness is an extraordinary achievement and Ashbery's challenge to the normal way of doing things in poetry is as vigorous and startling as ever."
(Alan Brownjohn, The Sunday Times, 10th January 1999)
"Wakefulness is Ashbery's rage against the dying of the light, against mental and emotional paralysis, against his 'negative capability acting up / again.'"
(Stephen Matterson, Poetry Ireland Review, no 62)
"In the cult of personality marked by narratives of the blandest sort, which sums up the majority of late twentieth-century poetics, Ashbery is doing something different: creating lasting works of art that restore ambiguity, and therefore holiness and vitality, to both self and poem...Where his world connects with ours, through phrases that ache and revel in their joy, it connects like no other of his contemporaries, a sure needle shot to our senses...Wakefulness is further proof that he is one of the most vital, revelatory, and original poets we have. His vigilance is a blessing upon poetry, a wake-up call to all slumbering aesthetics."
(Greg Harris, American Book Review, Jan-Feb 1999, volume 20)

John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. His books of poetry include Breezeway; Quick Question; Planisphere; Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems, which was awarded the 2008 International Griffin Poetry Prize; A Worldly Country; Where Shall I Wander; and Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. The winner of many prizes and awards both nationally and internationally, in 2011 he received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, and in 2012 he received a National Humanities Medal, presented by President Obama at the White House. He lived in New York until his death, aged ninety, in 2017.