SOURCE: A review of And the Stars Were Shining, in Poetry, Vol. 165, No. 1, October, 1994, pp. 44-7.

In the following review, Bedient offers tempered praise for And the Stars Were Shining, though he notes that this volume is "not one of his strongest."

John Ashbery famously has all the humor omitted by Eavan Boland, and then some. As is well known, disappointment leavened by humor, pathos gussied up in tinker-toy hats and cow-belled shoes, is his theme. "The afternoon / will fold you up," he promises in "Like a Sentence," "along with preoccupations / that now seem so important, until only a child / running around on a unicycle occupies center stage." It's part of his charm that he knows we won't believe him, part of his generosity to make the momentarily charming gesture.

"To nail the fizzle," as he put it in the poem "Joy" in Hotel Lautréamont (1992), is his...