Ludic Eloquence: On John Ashbery's Recent Poetry

John Ashbery's recent poetry might best be understood as an exuberant, often openly comic fantasia on the central themes and narratives of his major poems from the 1970s. The poet's ongoing preoccupations with the elasticity of time, the elusiveness of knowledge, the waywardness of desire--themes his earlier poems had explored with a kind of bemused severity--now appear gorgeously decked out in sequins and spangles, arrayed in glittering tropes and delicious phrases.