John Ash was born in Manchester in 1948 and began publishing poetry in the 1970s. In 1985 he moved to New York where he developed lasting friendships with several important American poets, including the wellknown writer John Ashbery. He later taught at the universities of Iowa and UC Berkeley. In 1996 he moved to Istanbul, where he still lives. Ash’s lifelong interest in Byzantine history is reflected in many of his later poems. ‘Backwards’ is from The Parthian Stations (Carcanet 2007).
Not wanting to be part of a crowd, I made my farewells to the twentieth century some years before it ended, but it occurs to me that I said and did nothing to greet the new century apart from getting drunk on the appropriate night.
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