"His poetry appeals not because it offers wisdom in a packaged form, but because the elusiveness and mysterious promise of his lines remind us that we always have a future and a condition of meaningfulness to start out toward. This book of beginnings takes us back to the mooring of John Ashbery's starting out, 'that day so long ago.' It contains a poetry whose beauties are endless."– "New York Times Book Review""Ashbery's poems do not evade the real; they deny it the power to prevent other realities from being conceived."– Paul Gray, "Time""This is the best possible introduction to the brilliant, difficult, and beautiful work of this poet."– "Publishers Weekly""No one writing poems in the English language is likelier than Ashbery to survive the severe judgments of time.... He is joining that American sequence that includes Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, and Hart Crane."– "Harold Bloom""The chances are very good that [Ashbery] will come to dominate the last third of this century as Yeats dominated the first."– "Poetry"
