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