"John Ashbery's A Wave expresses with painful recognisability the apartness, impermanence and incoherence of individual existence today, and yet produces exuberant script for survival."
(Marina Warner, The Sunday Times, 9th December 1984)

"light-footed and delectably irresponsible."
(Alfred Brendel, The Sunday Times, 9th December 1984)

"In A Wave Ashbery re-makes the strangeness of experience on a large scale and simultaneously invites the reader to look at it without evasion. The blind man will not see everything perhaps, but he may contemplate the experience as it is occurring in the poem. This opening into contemplation is as restorative an effect as any that poetry can bring about. For it to work only attention and awareness are needed. As always Ashbery is an available, even popular poet."
(Peter Hainsworth, The Times Literary Supplement, 21st December 1984))

"He recalls Stevens and Eliot, and the continuity of French poetry from Baudelaire to Surrealism...Ashbery may be the last nineteenth century Symbolist."
(Geoffrey Ward, The Cambridge Quarterly, 14th February 1985)