[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 half-serious intent—half-serious because the impossibility of succeeding is clear and a "godliberating whimsy" is thus required for sanity. Still, despite its high jinks, his poetry is philosophical. He knows as well as Heidegger that the future is the present's fizzle, both its champagne and its expiring tire. But where Heidegger erected a philosophy to it, Ashbery runs around in it like "the emperor's mice" ("Joy"). He's a poet of the ontological (and linguistic) blahs.

If the soul begins in a maternally inflected lack, as Lacan and Ashbery seem to agree, Ashbery's distinction is to find amusement as well as pain in this lack, a little room for affectionate fantasy, and to write it into a far more variegated imaginative whirl, and be more congenially companionable about it ("I think we can handle it together," he says in the title poem), than anyone else has done, even Samuel Beckett, for instance.

Compared to Boland, he's never single-stranded about anything, including aging. "It / isn't possible to be young anymore," he says in this most autumnally crumbly of his books. "Yet the tree treats me like a brute friend; / my own shoes have scarred the walk I've taken" ("Token Resistance"). This moves brilliantly from "being done to" to "being accepted by" to "having done harm to." It's as deep as it is swift. (The last line, however Lowellian, passes muster.) What saves Ashbery from droopy pathos is a die-hard gratitude for existence, sustained by the mysterious opening of Being to its own future, the exciting quality of that openness, "the blue acquiescence of spring." But of course he's shy about such joy—for, always, and despite the "peace, quiet, a dictionary … / It was as if all of it had never happened" ("And the Stars Were Shining"). Fizzle.

Still, the new book's not one of his strongest. Its "liberating whimsy" is less inspired than one could wish. The dazzle of, say, Houseboat Days is scarcely recalled. Partly the autumnal theme discourages it; partly it just isn't there. The focus lacks fierceness. If Ashbery here performs a lack of luster ("Okay, but can we have a little luster, / here, please, a little texture," he says in "Weather and Turtles"), it's because he's missing it. But that doesn't excuse the frequent silliness, for instance, in "My Gold Chain," "Nobody ever asked me to be a bridesmaid / so maybe I'm a bride?" Such humor is idle, self-flagellation with a rubber duck. "Life is legendary. We're very bullish / on life," he writes in "World's End." "Dogs and other lives / convince us life is dog-cheap." This is to beat a dead dog until it whimpers. "Thought I'd ankle over," the poet says in "In the Meantime, Darling." "Then the sca rushed past. / Hurricane Charlie and his sister / sure were glad to see us." Who'd have thought that Ashberian comedy would come to this: labored self-pity?

But the Ashbery with a genius for a paradoxically spanking pathos, even for a belated sublime bespattered with banality, is at least enough present in the book to make one want more of him—him exclusively. He's in these lines from "Like a Sentence," for instance:

          I was going to say I had squandered spring
     when summer came along and took it from me
     like a terrier a lady has asked one to hold for a moment
     while she adjusts her stocking in the mirror of a weighing machine.

Poor little man, the terrier-spring is not ever his to own—this is a fine comic conceit. Ashbery the fantastically gifted appears again at the close of the same poem:

                        for though we came
     to life as to a school, we must leave it without graduating
     even as an ominous wind puffs out the sails
     of proud feluccas who don't know where they're headed,
     only that a motion is etched there, shaking to be free.

This puffs at the imagination—has a paradigmatic magnificence that the contractions almost guarantee and the exotic "proud feluccas" can't sink (they're not, after all, grand vessels). The moving Ashbery appears again in "The Improvement": "I wake up, my face-pressed / in the dewy mess of a dream." This is the "traditional" done right, done over. He's in fine form again in "What's needed is to set us back on the track, having gently peed, and that for some orpheum other than ourselves" ("What Do You Call It When"). Boy and old man meld touchingly in the phrases "having gently peed" and "set us back on the track"—and though "orpheum" is not in the Oxford English Dictionary, as the name of some old-style American movie houses, it makes a shelter for the imagination, is the imagination as shelter.

Ashbery is a Renaissance-to-modern humanist of an absolutely minimal kind, which is better than not being one at all—in fact, he's one of the few poets who can still get away with stating humanist sentiments, which he does by getting in the first laugh. Forget big plans to build a world of abundance and justice for all; forget, that is, ambitious humanism. Yet even if "We sure live in a bizarre and furious / galaxy," he says in the title poem,

               now it's up to us to make it
     into an environment for maps to sidle up to,
     as trustingly as leeches. Heck, put us
     on the map, while you're at it.
     That way we can smoke a cigarette, and stay and sway,
     shooting the breeze with night and her swift promontories.

"Sure" and "Heck" are a tad too anxiously folksy, even if pseudo-folksy, but the casually grand scope, delivered in a shoot-the-breeze idiom, is irresistible.

And now a final example of the splendors of Ashbery from the uneven title poem, the finest yet:

                        For we end
     as we are forgiven, with chords the bird promised
     caught in our throats, O sweetest song,
     color of berries, that I lied for and extended
     improbably a little distance from the given grave.

Who besides Ashbery can write sublimely about something so dirt-cheap as disappointment with a lying little song the color of berries thrown in at a little distance from the given grave? He has the divine spark.