It is now fifty-four years since John Ashbery's first collection Some Trees, appeared, and thirty-five since his most celebrated volume, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. In recent years he has been canonized by the Library of America (Collected Poems 1956-1978, with a second volume to come), while remaining a highly productive poet well into his ninth decade. Wallace Stevens, in a philosophic old age, pursued 'The Plain Sense of Things', while another modern master, Yeats, turned instead to the fleshy distractions of Crazy Jane. What is Ashbery's route to tragic grandeur as he pursues the ghostlier demarcations of his late phase? 'You know something?/ I don't care', 'Circa' concludes, suggesting that, late phase or not, Ashbery's habitual flippancy will take some dislodging. Another poem is titled 'Default Mode', a style of writing his detractors might suggest he has occupied for all too many years now. 'The Later Me // shrinks from encounters with the earlier one', he announces, but whatever shifts in formal emphasis have marked Ashbery's work from one decade to the next, the underlying continuity, even for this laureate of discontinuity and disjunction, is obvious and profound.

Planisphere is a sizeable volume made up entirely of short lyrics. 'Very little was known about anything/in the old time', he writes in 'Chair Rental', renouncing the past once more, but staying true to it in the sense that very little appears to be known about anything now, either. 'There's no time like the fuzzy present', fuzzy remaining the upper level of attainable certainty. 'Make sense to you?/Makes sense to me', he declares in 'Just How Cloudy Everything Gets'. If the charm and whimsy of late Ashbery suggest a writer who has gone soft, Planisphere is not without its fiercer flashes. 'And the people?', he asks at the end of 'Logistics': 'They've left too,/wedged in a fucking dream'. Who are Ashbery's people? An unknowable they, now herdlike and benign, now a paranoid and threatening mass. Thirty of  'Default mode's thirty-two lines begin with the words 'They were living in America', and beneath the poem's commonplace permutations lurks an unmistakeable sense of menace and cultural exhaustion (They were living in America but it's all over ..../They were living in America the same old same old'). Similarly, every line in 'They Knew What They Wanted' is a film title beginning with 'They': an aleatory exercise, but one that lifts its recycled material to a pitch of claustrophobic intensity:

They made me a fugitive.
They made me a criminal.
They kill only their masters.
They shall have music.

They were sisters.
They still call me Bruce.
They won't believe me.
They won't forget.

It is a paradox that Ashbery should be one of the supreme living poets in English yet, simultaneously, someone whose collections a reader might all too easily allow to slip by, given the profligate abundance of his later years. It is indeed difficult to single out poems from Planisphere that will vie with his many anthology fixtures, but a piece such as 'Fx' taps marvellously into the age-old Ashbery theme of the endlessly mazy flow of poetic fancy, and the pulsing, visionary energy that drives it on: 'Has it all been like unto/a weird and wonderful intro,/or, divining blistered/rage into consciousness?'. Late Ashbery is a body of work that stays with the reader, not for individual poems but for the climate of autumnal, enduringly insouciant mystery they summon. Or as he writes in'Uptick': 'Too many words,/but precious'.