John Ash could be the best English poet of his generation. Yet somehow it seems inappropriate to play the old rating game with him. Ash lives as an expatriate in Istanbul, a vantage point from which the machinations of "po-biz" must seem very far away. And that distance isn't merely a geographical fact but a condition of his work. The opening poem in this new collection, a short lyric called "My Poetry," is about being misunderstood, an event that leads the poet in the last line to declare his "Sadness and freedom!"

I'm grateful for Ash's lonerhood. Most poets claim to write however they please. This one really does. His poems have a feeling of conversational openness, a winning quizzicality that reminds me of James Schuyler's work from the early seventies. Too speedy and well-proportioned to dissolve into mere chat, these poems segue between all sorts of topics: the poet's childhood in Manchester, Anatolian architecture, the danger of making love "in a badly run game-reserve." In this way, Ash's poetry resembles the city of his title: just as the city acts as a catchment for all the migration from other places, so the poem gathers diverse subject matter into its manifold flow. Ash intersperses his river-like long poems with shorter lyrics. These poems have a plainer and almost allegorical feeling tone. The best are "Returns," "My Life," "Falling," and the title poem, "To The City":

The village has come to the city.
In the narrow street, in the crowd
pressing down it, in the faces of tall buildings
we plainly see the shimmer of poplars
in the emptiness of the plateau, the huddle
of houses from which the voices of families,
and tribes before them, rise, reaching across
the sharp ridges of their displacement
to settle like smoke in the deepest hollows
of the city. They are very near to us, in the store
or the next apartment, in the shadow of the tower
yet are heard as distance, as ignorance,
and, in their echoes, the city seems to shudder
like something imagined from very far away—
glass city for those without windows. Their shoes
sit at the doorways as if begging for admission.

The poem blends absence and presence, dream image and naturalistic reality. Like those shoes at the doorway, Ash dwells (in this poem and in all his work) in a borderland. By living there he maintains a state of desire, an intensified engagement with feelings as fragile and surprising as the ghost of poplars he sees in the city towers.

— Peter Campion