"The monochrome 16-line poems of Shadow Train have a great deal of charm and an elegance of diction...The feel of the poetry is compulsive enough for us to see life for a moment the Ashbery way, as the young Auden once made us see it his way."
(John Bayley, The London Review of Books, 2nd-15th September 1982)

"Of Ashbery's work in recent years this is the best, most accessible and most rewarding."
(Martin Booth, The Tribune, 2nd April 1982

"The content of his work may be elusive, but the structures have grown increasingly formal, even beautiful. The fifty poems collected in Shadow Train are each of them sixteen lines long, governed by immediately distinctive and memorable rhythms, and above all possessed by a sense of humour which makes even their most hermetic moments agreeably modest....An English reader is likely to be reminded of Edward Lear: there is a similar manic despair informing his jokes and inventions, and the tensions between that concern with language on a very plain level and the hectic refusal to come clean about whatever it is that pricks him into verse in the first place makes for some extraordinary effects, the finest of which do not preclude tenderness."
(Robert Nye, The Times, 25th March 1982)

"Saying, for Ashbery, requires the lightest and most evasive of touches. His poems hate to be held down."
(John Bayley, The London Review of Books, 2nd-15th September 1982)

"What is striking about Shadow Train is not that it demands repeated re-reading, but that it rewards it so fully. It succeeds in the way Ashbery would wish poetry to succeed. It forces us back into life: chastened, wiser, and ready to pursue happiness against whatever obstacles may seem to stand in its way."
(Tim Dooley, The Poetry Review, volume 72, 1982)