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The 20th volume from the man who, for many, has come to epitomize the voice of contemporary poetry. As usual, Ashbery’s dry humor predominates, a deadpan, ironic-comic tone in which pop-culture references, slightly out-of-kilter slang, and non sequiturs tumble over one another in a formally elegant array. At his best, the American genius Ashbery resembles the most is not another poet but Buster Keaton, the darkly ironic avatar of the human as machine. Through the cunning manipulation of cliché and the clever placement of line breaks to cement punch line, Ashbery achieves brilliant comic effects, suddenly swerving into the poignant. He is able to evoke the melancholy evanescence of a world of doomed objects; he can even get results from the hoariest conceits, as in “Memories of Imperialism” (which exploits the confusion of Admiral Dewey with the equally famed library science innovator of the same last name). However, for too much of the second half of the volume, Ashbery seems to be on cruise control, erecting an edifice of private imagery piled high to no apparent purpose. In his Charles Eliot Norton lectures (Other Traditions, p. 1325), he says of fellow poet John Wheelwright, “Even where I cannot finally grasp his meaning, which is much of the time, I remain convinced by the extraordinary power of his language as it flashes by on its way from somewhere to somewhere else.” He could be writing about his own best work.

Regrettably, that level of achievement is only on display some of the time here.