At the heart of Ashbery’s work is a passionate search for an always evasive truth, for what Milton called an “answerable style.” Each story or version is always an elegy to its own passing, but an elegy in the traditional sense that it leads to renewed hope. Part of the poet’s task is to act as analytic filter: “will they come back, on what day, and will I know the truth / Then, and so be able to accept them as mere painted / Portents of what each of us wants to know?” he asks. In “Winter Weather Advisory,” he also questions, “what have we proved? That we didn’t have one idea / Worth having, that all else is beneath us, / If within our grasp?” But it is that which is outside his grasp that is worth having, so that after immersing himself in detail, he can later look up from it in the poem, from inside the carnivalistic experience of language, as opposed to an over-simple and detached “generally accepted notion of what history consists of.”

Each story or version is always an elegy to its own passing, but an elegy in the traditional sense that it leads to renewed hope.

This “canceling” is opposed to the deconstructing that always leaves a trace of the past, however reconstituted, as an act of “responsibility” to history. The poems are not at all “confessions” in the sense of a confessional school of poetry, but they are confessions in the sense that they reconstruct a past in order to construct a future. A look at the first and last poems of the book will help us summarize. “Vetiver” describes how “Ages passed slowly, like a load of hay” until all experience becomes “distilled in letters of the alphabet.” Well after any beginning, time seems to be “Sinking deeper in the sand as it wound toward / The conclusion.” But the point is, since vétiver is a French/Tamil word for root, that the sinking is a double movement in time, towards a beginning that embraces the conclusion, the roots. Thus, when “someone examines his youth” he is also examining his whole life, his future. In the end, “the crying / In the leaves is saved,” an allusion to Yeats, and to the future blooming of leaves, suggesting that the roots for any future, the terms of all vision, are in a reconstructed language, a style carnivalistic enough to hold past styles.

In “April Galleons” the poem begins in medias res — “Something was burning,” and with a sense of surprise that a simple verification has at last been reached. But that simplicity soon begins to unravel: “And where do the scraps / Of meaning come from? Obviously / It was time to be off, in another / Direction.” From there, the narrator is unsure if things only “sounded as though they existed,” whether it is only a question of getting to “know our names only in a different/ Pronunciation.” Perhaps, he argues, everything, all possibilities, “all trees seemed to exist.” The final stance of the poem, and Ashbery’s work in general, is a painful and realistic one. On one hand, the speaker does not want the image of a past “golden age” to “vanish” except for a paltry image of a “beggar girl… incomprehensibly weeping,” yet also does not want our “unsatisfactory honesty” to be make falsely golden image by allowing the past to be “colored” over. He opts finally for an affirmation of the always distant, for an ironic detachment, for a sense that arriving at a knowledge of what is burning is not as crucial as the elegiac struggle through the evidence, the details, the unsaid.

One of the major problems facing the contemporary poet, then, is how to take her or his own language.

This whole notion of the unsaid, of language’s dialectic relation to the absent, recalls Jacques Lacan who writes in Écrits that “the function of language is not to inform but invoke. What I seek in speech is the response of the Other.” By focusing on the otherness in language, Lacan downplays the common notion that language marks and brings forth a full presence. The result is that the referential function of language becomes less important than the power of language to conjure absences, other voices, metamorphic changes. Language then comes to mark our own otherness, our strangeness in the world — the kind of experience, say, Wordsworth goes through in the famous “Crossing the Alps” episode in The Prelude where nature is suddenly seen as alien, transformed, even threatening when his naive sense of mastery over it is exposed for what it is. Since the time of the Romantics, this has been an essential, almost primal experience, for a poet — and in our society of subtle and not-so-subtle discriminations, the position of the woman poet is certainly one of the most legitimate and productive perspectives through which to evaluate this experience of otherness. One of the major problems facing the contemporary poet, then, is how to take her or his own language. Derrida cites Condillac in The Archeology of the Frivolous, “You often speak your own language without you yourself understanding what you say, or that, at best, you almost understand yourself. However, there is enough for you and others, since they pay you with the same money.”

To build a poetics upon that notion is to construct a poetry of “paradoxes and oxymorons” (the original title for Ashbery’s Shadow Train), a poetry whose figures of speech endlessly contradict themselves, qualify and redefine their own meanings by returning to them with supplementary variations. This process of return defines the pacing and timing, the very impulse of Ashbery’s rhythm, the way the poems project, emerge, as it were, out of their own pasts towards an open-ended future. It is more than curious, then, that the word paradox comes from the Greek that means “conflicting with expectation,” implying a sense of self-questioning movement towards a future. And the Greek ancestry of “oxymoron” suggests a “sharp foolishness,” the sense of the carnivalistic playfulness inherent in Ashbery’s vision. The two words together suggest the blend of the serious and the comic, the visionary and the debunked, the carnivalistic vision that so defines Ashbery’s work.