"About much of Ashbery's work there is a fascinating panache of diction and phrasing which sends the reader back to the poems repeatedly...Ashbery throws out a challenge to present readers' assumptions as great as that once given by Eliot or Pound."
(K. Sutherland, The Critical Quarterly, vol. 20)

"A painter's eye, an observer's irony, no slouch at the everyday trivialities of varied existences - all attributes that make this sophisticated but accessible collection one of the most stimulating books of poetry published this year. "
(Time Out, 20th August 1977)

"Ashbery constructs a floridly rhetorical and sententious poetic language, capable of encompassing the banal and the irrelevant, in which to render the meanderings of the mind."
(K. Sutherland, The Critical Quarterly, vol. 20)