Whenever John Ashbery deals out his royal flush of persnickety syntax, tailspun twaddle, and eel-slippery lyric convolution, the mind is where it ought to be. Whipping up spun dimensions in a burning flux of calculated demonry, gossamer insights snookered away in back-closets of the soul, an encroaching blur of poetic hunger just beyond our knowing.

We can *feel* the poet stenciling out his stanzas, sifting every event for its fine-grained visceral crunch, its lyrical *there-ness*, a mind designed to sound deep water with the halcyon light of Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens, the great unassailable precursors of American verse (so difficult to rediscover and appreciate in the morass of "poetry-slams" and "performance-art" that currently glut our poetry venues).

Imagine the type of mind that could respond to Crane and Stevens without flinching, over forty years and eighteen volumes of verse. Imagine the solitaire.

Ashbery staggered me in my late teens with *Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror*(1975), lighting up my sinuses in a cocaine wash of zippety rhythms and studied inflection, peopling my sleep with deep Figurae and a lush library of maps, persuading the fool's heart in me to break from my covert and run wild with the night mind of the race, the structures and possibilities of my life overloaded by his cognitive dazzle. "The geek shall inherit the earth," this poet seemed to be telling me, and I, hamstrung by gynephobia and a crippling social-anxiety, took the old codger at his word.

Ashbery taught me how to keep pace with the world, to saturate the atoms of life with an inward stare, yoking myself nakedly to the ebon flight of his lush written world. With Ashbery's deep intellect and dickety-slippity wit, his pretzelly stanzas and mind-torquing conceptual corkscrewing, I could go on forever relighting my own image, against steady palls of black pain. (But don't all great poets teach us precisely this?)

Witness Ashbery at his most serpentine: "To create a work of art that the critic cannot even talk about ought to be the artist's chief concern." Ouch. Where does that leave the rest of us? Fumbling for categorical handholds on the cliff-face of so-called "language-poetry"? Shrugging off the old man's labyrinthian navel-picking as wastefully avant-garde academic verbiage? Most of these poems seem to erupt in an obfuscatory strain of muddled, stickjaw phonetics, then nip and flounder and twiddle and skip-rope through some half-fledged convolution of thought, reproducing the vagaries and blindsights of poetic composition itself, biting its tail in an Ouroboros vertigo of self-reference and studied awkwardness, an infinite regress short-circuiting each new wired fragment of stunted dramatic logic, of discontinued narrative transit, flip-flopped to articulate its crackerjacked, contradictory character, an uber-villain's squadron of twittering machines set a-flutter to tweak the night with the familiar Stevensian tragedies arising from epistemology.and solipsism.

Yes, we can analyze it now (or else pretend our way to some jerry-rigged solution). All the whistles and clicks of inbound meaning. The poetic tracery of nightvision cunning, unfastening the set of our bones, gorging our deep human need for prosody and inflection, all taken to grief in the massing forms of some depth-stirring new solip:system. (Sometimes a great poem is all it takes.) Ashbery's rippling, obfuscatory surface-tension hides and betokens a mind-pretzelling world of ninny-ish cognitive delight, of a "peculiar slant of memory that intrudes on the dreaming model...filtered and influenced by it, until no part remains that is surely you."

Give this book a chance.... Recommended points of entry: "Soonest Mended"(87), "As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat"(163), "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror"(188), "Wet Casements"(225), "Houseboat Days"(231), "Tapestry" (269), "A Wave"(322).

John Ashbery once again takes me on a fantastic ride with his four dimentional poetry. Highly recommended for the poet with writer's block because Ashbery teaches us that bounderies are only limited in the mind. I call him tangential because his imagry shoots one into as many directions as one has.

I don't like to misquote other writers and artists...so, it was, naturally, Bernardo Bertolucci who said about himself that he has "a nostalgia for the present". Ophuls certainly had a nostalgia for the past. My admiration and appreciation for Ashbery's work grows stronger all of the time!

Possibly the most unappreciated poetic genius of our time, F. T. Prince, a Renaissance scholar who has published many works on Shakespeare and Milton in particular, is a master of language and style whose traditional forms, including the rarely seen Old- English-based technique of flyting, provide the backdrop for veritable poetic vision. Prince's work gracefully embodies the spiritual intellectualism of Eliot sans the religious angst, the craft of Browning without the constraints of convention.

This volume of collected works includes shorter poems from Prince's early career, when much of his writing reflected his South African heritage, as well as lengthy pieces that transport readers into the worlds of Hasidim, English poet Rupert Brooke, Chinese poet Po Chu-i, Byron and Shelley, and, of course, the intricate worlds of Prince himself. (Visiting the collection's "Notes" section is essential.) As you read Prince, you realize that most poetry today lacks the profundity of both meticulous skill and insight that Prince commands so readily. Because of his myriad brilliance, reading Prince can be a challenge, yet you will emerge from the depths-and heights-of Prince's voice and, having been exposed to truths of humanity, will never be quite the same.