The ideal Ashbery reader is a foreigner or an extra-terrestrial: there can be no more liberating way of learning English than from these wacky, dandified samplings.

ECONOMIST: Modern poetry can be plaintive or richly idiomatic, or both

There is a sort of meeting of opposites between Mr Muldoon's pointed, intricate prestidigitations and the aimless yet alert shamblings of the veteran New York School poet, John Ashbery.

ECONOMIST: Modern poetry can be plaintive or richly idiomatic, or both

This is the drab, barely expressed misery that one finds in a lot of contemporary poetry Ms Olds is quite as influential in her way as Mr Muldoon or Mr Ashbery.

ECONOMIST: Modern poetry can be plaintive or richly idiomatic, or both

At the other end of the spectrum from both Mr Ashbery and Mr Muldoon is someone like Sharon Olds, who writes poetry of sheer, unreconstructed pathos that is not so much autobiographical as autobiological about herself from the neck down.

ECONOMIST: Modern poetry can be plaintive or richly idiomatic, or both