News at Eleven: It does not wear this heavily

or sentimentally; Ashbery is heroically free of the world-was-better-when-my-body-was-younger piffle that mars some of his well-known contemporaries. Instead we have the sense of the poet (and us with him) being always inside time, suspended within it as within some queer medium (an entirely proprietary substance, one part limestone and two parts prosecco). There is no lyrical leap to ecstasy, to someplace beyond the capacious Ashberian land. Time itself is the worldly country, and there is no other. Not for the living, and perhaps not the dead either.

from The Nation: The Bubble and the Globe: On John Ashbery

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