John Ash Biography

British poet, born in Manchester, educated at the University of Birmingham. He was a teacher and research assistant from 1969 to 1975, and subsequently a lecturer and freelance writer, becoming domiciled in New York in 1985. Initially, his poetry took as its principal models the work of the French Symbolistes, with his responses to the American examples of Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, and others proving formative in his writing's later development. His collections of poetry include Casino (1978), The Bed and Other Poems (1981), The Goodbyes (1982), The Branching Stairs (1984), Disbelief (1987), and The Burnt Pages (1991). An exuberance of aesthetic gesture in a context of wittily rendered urban realism is characteristic of the innovative and attractive quality of much of his poetry. He has also published, with Louis Turner, a work on tourism entitled The Golden Hordes (1976).