Commotion of Birds
PBS Recommendation Winter 2016 Karen McCarthy Woolf ’ – Carol Rumens

’ – Carol Rumens

Resisting the poetic trend of showing why ordinary things are magical

this is it' – Ray Gonzalez

Underneath the defamiliarising ingenuity

the complexities of work and marriage

Commotion of Birds <br> <b> PBS Recommendation Winter 2016 </b> Karen McCarthy Woolf ’ – Carol RumensPBS Recommendation Winter 2016 For more than sixty years, the poems of John Ashbery have served as signposts guiding us through the delights, woes, hypocrisies, and uncertainties of living in the modern world. With language harvested from everyday speech, fragments of pop culture, and objects and figures borrowed from art and literature, his work makes light out of darkness, playing with tone and style to show how even the seemingly frivolous stuff of