A new collection by the major American poet presents more than a hundred works exhibiting the author's trademark skeptical edge, learning, and depth of spirit. By the author of And the Stars Were Shining. The often-cited "difficulty" of Ashbery's poetry lies in its refusal to separate clearly the intrinsic from the extraneous. It comes to us unlabeled and uncompromised: "an aesthetic remoteness blossoming profusely/but vaguely around what does/stand out here and there." But like abstract paintings that leave us awestruck for no easily articulated reason, the poems generate waves of infinitely ponderable possibilities. Enabled by Ashbery's mastery of syntax, haywire similes (summer takes spring away "like a terrier a lady has asked me to hold for a moment"), and linguistic congeniality ("Gosh, what a limited bunch of things to do there is."), they offer rich cascades of surprise, colloquies of disparate voices that may or may not emanate from the same consciousness. And as funny as Ashbery allows himself to be ("You don't learn the cancan at obedience school"), his oblique forays into the traditional poetic genres of elegy ("Others Shied Away") and meditation ("My Philosophy of Life") are genuinely affecting. Recommended.?Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, N.Y. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. Ashbery, recipient of the grandest of literary prizes, is as prolific as he is masterful. He is also insouciant, elegant, and blithely surreal. Here, in his seventeenth substantial poetry collection, he is also urbane and just a tad cynical. In "Atonal Music," he writes, "It's fine to reminisce,/ but no one really cares about your childhood,/not even you." In "Dangerous Moonlight," one character tells another that they have "a million things to do/and restoring your peace of mind isn't one of them." As usual, Ashbery mixes his styles from classic forms to near prose, and glides effortlessly from the world at large to the world within. He is as adept at intoning the babble of mind as at limning the dynamism of a street scene or the quiet of a garden. As Ashbery assumes a variety of personas with all manner of attitudes in all kinds of situations, he gives voice to the perplexity we perceive all around us and seethe with within. Ashbery is a virtuoso all right, indefatigable and dazzling. Donna Seaman Abe's Collision Allotted Spree Andante Misterioso Angels (you Anxiety And Hardwood Floors At First I Thought I Wouldn't Say Anything About It At Liberty And Cranberry Atonal Music Awful Effects Of Two Comets The Blot People By An Earthquake By Guess And By Gosh Can You Hear, Bird Cantilever The Captive Sense Chapter Ii, Book 35 Chronic Symbiosis Collected Places Coming Down From New York The Confronters Dangerous Moonlight A Day At The Gate Debit Night The Desolate Beauty Parlor On Beach Avenue Do Husbands Matter? Dull Mauve Eternity Sings The Blues The Faint Of Heart Fascicle Five O'clock Shadow From The Observatory Fuckin' Sarcophagi Getting Back In Gladys Palmer The Green Mummies Heavenly Arts Polka Hegel I Saw No Need I, Too In An Inchoate Place In Old Oklahoma The Latvian Like A Sentence Limited Liability Love In Boots Love's Stratagem Love's Stratagem Many Are Dissatisfied Many Are Dissatisfied The Military Base Military Pastoral My Name Is Dimitri My Philosophy Of Life A New Octagon Nice Morning Blues No Earthly Reason No Longer Very Clear Obedience School Ode To John Keats Of A Particular Stranger Operators Are Standing By Others Shied Away Palindrome The Peace Plan The Penitent Penthesilea Plain As Day A Poem Of Unrest Point Lookout Poor Knights Of Windsor The Problem Of Anxiety Quick Question Reverie And Caprice Safe Conduct Salon De The The Sea See How You Like My Shoes The Shocker Sleepers Awake Something Too Chinese Swaying, The Apt Traveler Exited My House Taxi In The Glen Theme Three Dusks Today's Academicians Touching, The Similarities Tower Of Darkness Tremendous Outpouring Tuesday Evening Twilight Park Umpteen The Waiting Ceremony A Waking Dream The Walkways The Water Carrier What The Plants Say When All Her Neighbors Came Where It Was Decided We Should Be Taken Woman Leaning Yes, Dr. Grenzmer. How May I Be Of Assistance To You? Yesterday, For Instance You Dropped Something You Would Have Thought You, My Academy Young People -- Table of Poems from Poem Finder® John Ashbery is Charles P. Stevenson Professor in the Department of Languages and Literature at Bard College; in 1989-90 he was the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard.