I cannot avoid the judgment that the year's best book of poems is Ashbery's Houseboat Days…. The modish eccentricities that once weakly defended this great poet against tradition are now all but gone. Instead, a subtle rhetoric, masking itself in images of transparency and as a style of amazing limpidity, evades and reinterprets poetic tradition as sinuously and persuasively as did the rhetoric of Frost and of Stevens. Four poems in particular are likely to impose themselves upon the canon: "Loving Mad Tom," "Wet Casements," the Orphic elegy, "Syringa," and the very ambitious and mellow longer poem, "Fantasia on 'The Nut-Brown Maid'," which sustains comparison with the magnificent "Fragment" of "The Double Dream of Spring." "Wet Casements," which is as powerful as "Soonest Mended" in that volume, is a short meditation that immediately establishes its inevitability. Ashbery has suffered both from the aura of his supposed "school" and...