If the New York poets are each as individual as New York taxi drivers, then with Frank O'Hara at the wheel we cruise through Greenwich Village with occasional side trips out to Fire Island. John Ashbery drives us down deserted back streets between huge locked warehouses with occasional glimpses of the harbor, then stops and soliloquizes about his driving, his poor sense of direction and the tricks perspective can play and asks us if we really want to go to the destination we had requested…. O'Hara is casual, open, revealing…. Ashbery can be formal, hermetic, secretive: he often slides a deliberate barrier between himself and his readers like the glass shield protecting a New York taxi driver from his passengers.

In Ashbery's poems there are constant echoes of other, secret dimensions, like chambers resounding behind hollow panels of an old mansion rumored to contain secret passages (which our...