[Shadow Train] is endearing and exasperating in the same ways that all of Ashbery's poetry is. It reflects his great strengths as a writer: endless inventiveness, superb mimicry, artistic transformations of the banal into the beautiful. And it demonstrates his weaknesses as well: a certain preciousness, an absence of self-criticism, an artistic program that allows the manufacture of poetry almost at will and without inspiration. The problem of excessive length that sometimes mars Ashbery's most ambitious efforts is here neatly solved: since each section of Shadow Train is a poem in its own right, as in a sonnet cycle, the reader who experiences tedium can pass on to the next poem without much loss or guilt. The loose structure, formally pleasing, also invites browsing and skimming.

Indeed, I have always found skimming and skating to be the best means of enjoying Ashbery, which is not the admission of...