Sometimes when Ashbery starts to make too much sense, his poems lose force, as in some of the selections from Can You Hear, Bird. "...By an Earthquake" breaks out of this tendency with its playful form, a series of disconnected vignettes like these: "Albert has a dream, or an unusual experience, psychic or otherwise, which enables him to conquer a serious character weakness and become successful in his new narrative, 'Boris Karloff,'" and "Too many passengers have piled onto a cable car in San Francisco; the conductor is obliged to push some of them off." And the long poem "Tuesday Evening" is made of sometimes Shakespearean rhyming quatrains: "...It's getting late; the pageant / oozes forward, act four is yet to come, and so is dusk." The dada-esque prose poem "The Bobinski Brother," from Your Name Here (2000), could hardly be more different. "'Her name is Liz, and I need her in my biz,' I hummed wantonly. A band of clouds all slanted in the same direction drifted across the hairline horizon like a tribe of adults and children, all hastening toward some unknown destination." And so on.

The visual asserts its importance with the book-length poem "Girls on the Run," inscribed "after Henry Darger," the reclusive folk artist. "...The droplets made diagonal streaks in the air / where pterodactyls had been." But in the final volume represented here, 2005's Where Shall I Wander, Ashbery seems to be looking at politics and war, though, as always, in a skewed way. The prose poem "Heavy Home" closes: "For the time being the disputed enclave is yours. But its cadence is elsewhere." Finally, the short poem "Annuals and Perennials" begins with a discussion of "...this America, home of the free, / colored ashes smeared on the base / or pedestal that flourishes ways of doubting / to be graceful..." and ends with this devastating one-line stanza:

"We have shapes but no power."

By contrast, Ashbery's poems - certainly the best of them, as selected in this volume - come in many shapes, and bear masses of cutting, jostling power.