"The dimensions of Ashbery's artistic intelligence are an extraordinary feeling for language tone and rhythm, a powerful memory for his experience of art, an imagination that is more auditory than visual, [and] an apparently limitless capacity for astonishingly fresh verbal combinations . . . Ashbery's poetry demands not only reading with highest concentration but persistent rereading: the mastering of it becomes a kind of spiritual experience."--Richard Kostelanetz, The New York Times

"On the level of argument, [Ashbery's poems] are an tempt, deeply convoluted in nature, to describe the world and our descriptions of it. Speed is an important feature of his work and this level of meaning is characterized by the rapidity of his transitionshis thoughts have the capacity to change direction, easily and quickly. On a second level, the level of tone, his poems come across as laconic, straightforward, almost intimate."--John Redmond, London review of Books