John Ashbery's work has amused, amazed, outraged and appalled, delighted and divided readers of poetry for over fifty years. And the debate about his books still rages; some condemning him as an obscure joker, others praising him as an obscure joker, others praising him as a magical genius. That his work should provoke such passionate oppositions seems in itself sufficient reason for considering it here. Furthermore, critical explications and or decodings of John Ashbery's poetry are themselves contentious. Stephen Burt observed in an article in the Times Literary Supplement that anyone critiquing Ashbery risks 'having sceptics tell you that you made it all up: that the poems demonstrate ingenuity not from the poet but from his interpreters.' If we add to this ebent the slenderest possibility that it might also be pretty extraordinary poetry, then the consideration of a new book by John Ashbery becomes nothing short of a necessity. Planisphere begins with a poem of love in old age: 'Is it possible that spring could be/ once more approaching? We forgot each time/ what a mindless buisness it is.' (Alcove) The intelligent, joyful wondering at spring's resurgence isn't unalloyed however: it 'refus[es] to take sides .../...lest an agenda - horrors! - be imputed to it/ and the whole point of its being spring collapse..." Ashbery's poems are of course notoriously rich in whimsy, humour and sometimes plain wackiness, but they never flinch from reporting the world in all its terrible realities. The realities addressed in Planishphere are very much those of his most recent books: namely, human love, mortality and the vagaries of fate - which is not suprisingly for a man well into his eighties. But he faces the tribulations of age and time with a kind of sagacious elan. In ' River of the Canoefish', for example, he confronts an image of abundance (of a lifetime's poems, perhaps?) almost with a sense of revulsion. Once upon a time the canoefish were charming but...

Today they are abundant as mackeral, as far as the eye can see,/ tumbled, tumescent, tinted all the colours of the rainbow/ though not in the same order,/ a swelling, scumbled mass, rife with incident/ and generally immune to sorrow//Shall we gather at the river? On Second thought, lets not (River of the Canoefish).

Ashbery does comic despair better than any other contemporary poet I know; his left field wit remains sharp as ever. Often wry, sometimes surreal, and occasionally both at the same time, the opening lines of his continue to raise a chuckle. Here are a few at random: 'I told them I was leaving and they were all thrilled,' 'Is that a groin?', 'There is a tremendous interest in dog-related items...' and my personal favourite: 'Ow. In fact ouch.' Sometimes, it's true, the playful whimsy wears a little thin. I'm thinking here of the collage of movie titles that make up ' They Knew What they Wanted', and 'Default Mode' ('They were living in America for the pleasure of it all./ They were living in America as one grows passionately...' etc) But that's four pages out of around a hundred and fifty and it would be churlish to quibble over that kind of strike-rate, John Ashbery knows a lot about a lot of things, and Planisphere is a characteristically unruly treasure-house of information, drawn from the poet's lifetime of reading, looking, talking and watching. The poems are stuffed- maybe occassionally over-stuffed- with references to medieval French, cartoons, metaphysical poetry (Sir Thomas Wyatt's 'They flee from me..' crops up, in fragements, in several places),  Shakespeare's sonnets (quotations- actual, morphed and mangled- are scattered amongst the poems), television advertising, camp lexicography, history, and, possibly his specialist subject, film.

There is a wonderful and deceptively relaxed, conversation poem, 'The Tower of London', that conflates a partial and sped-up history of Richard III with the cast and incidental details of a movie about him from the 1930s. The detailing zips back and forth between received historical 'fact' and the ators who may or may not have played the various character. It's a poem about the arbitrariness of history and memory, about the roles we take on and the ones that posterity assigns to us; but it's all done with the kind of deft humour and ease that belies the seriousness of its subject matter- ambition, torture, murder, the psycholpathology of so-called 'great men'. Something of the protean multifariousness of Ashbery's content is captured in the title of the book. A planisphere (for those of you, like me, who didn't know) is a globe flattened into two dimensions and according to Helen Vendler in her review in The New York Times, is drawn from Andrew Marvell's 'The Definition ofLove' in which two lovers are forever kept apart by the goddess Fate: 'And therefore her decress of steel/ Us as the distant poles have placed/ (Though Love's whole world on us doth wheel),/ Not by themselves to be embraced,//Unless the giddy heaven fall,/And earth some new convulsion tear./ And us to join, the world should all/ Be cramp'd into a planisphere.' The Ashberian world is one where the heavens can get a little 'giddy', where the poles do sometimes meet, and teeming world is, indeed, 'cramp'd' onto the two dimensions of the page. As if to gve us something to hang on to, the poems in Planisphere are arranged in alphabetical order, from 'Alcove' to the 'Zymurgy'. This is a tactic Ashbery has employed before- in the collection Can you Hear, Bird - and we remain uncertain as to whether this is the poet who is being wilfully prosaic, teasingly playful or simply side-stepping the practical difficulties of how the poems should be organised. Uncertainty is, of course, part of the deal struck between Ashbery and his readers, and it's also what unsettles some and has them feeling that they are being taken for something of a ride. But even if it is a rife (and maybe, sometimes, it is) it's an intoxicating and dizzying trip.

Ashbery made his poetric reputation with Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror and, in particular, the long title poem from that collection. The extended lyric featured a lot in his work, but lately not so much - nothing in Planisphere extends beyond three pages and the majority of poems are no longer than a page. But fans of the long Ashbery poem, the meandering meditation, need not feel short-changed. Taken as a whole, the collection is still infused with a strong sense of that expansive lyrical gift and many of the poems connect up, if you know what I mean, rather in the manner of loosely affiliated suite. The themes of memory and looking bacj, or even looking back on the act of 'looking back', recur throughout; 'In a hundred years,/when today's modern buildings look inviting/ again, like abstract bric-a-brac, we'll look back/ at how we were cheated, pull up our socks, zip/ our pants, then smile for the camera, watch/ the birdie as he watches us all day." (Attabled with the Spinning Years) There's something unyieldingly clear-eyed and suddenly and icily bleak about us watching the birdie watching us, isn't there? And it's an effect achieved in part by sound as well as sense; consider all those short, sharp 'a's in line three, the peppy popping 'p's in lines four and five, the way the passage is slowed down to its mini-denouement by the drag of the longer flatter, fuzzier vowel sounds. There is so much in John Ashbery's poetry that relies on evocation or so-called musical effects, so much that attempts to find another way into our sense of the world, its time, its truth, and the place of the self inside it, that when he says things plainly it comes off as more arresting for its abrupt, stripped-back clarity. 'The Winemakers', one of Planisphere's longer poems, swerves through these techniques of abstract, musical language, through what I recall one critic referring to as 'interior impressionism'  before it finds a plainer resolution. 'So it is with the things that were more or less/ dear to us and are now enfolded in the dream/ of their happening. A man comes to the end of the drive,/ looks around. No-one sees him. He putters/ and in the end is the last to leave, We may write about him,/ or how his walk affected us. There he goes/ again. If tact is a mortal sin/ we shall not miss.' Somehow this simplified image of a man who 'putters' (the colloquial American for 'potters') in his driveway unseen, captures where Ashbery's work has made landfall. He seems to be saying that our quiet, careful attention, our tact, like the tact of the poet, is tiny, modest, but unbreakable link in the chain, in the larger narrative that post-modernism seemed to dismiss.