Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror was the first of John Ashbery's books to be published in Britain by Carcanet Press in 1977. Ashbery's most celebrated book, it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award and the National Book Critics' Circle Award. Reading its title poem, said Michael Glover in the Independent Review, was "like riding a wild though smoothly flowing roller-coaster" ; the shorter poems in the collection are no less exhilarating.
The magnitude of Ashbery's achievement has become clear, and Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror remains the key to his oeuvre, and one of the essential books of twentieth-century poetry.