After the `monstrous, magnificent sprawl' of John Ashbery's 216-page poem Flow Chart (1991) and the further munificence of Hotel Lautreamont (1992), his sixteenth collection, And the Stars were Shining, includes a thirteen-part title poem which is a major achievement in American poetry, with the wise wit and heartbreak of Ashbery's urbane, unsettle imagination, subject to time's encroachments and the vagaries of the human heart. `He is quite simply, ' The Times said, `the finest poet in English of his generation, ' a generation that includes his friends Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler and Kenneth Koch, as well as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. He moves tradition forward with a deceptively casual style. Language is `a landscape sweeping out from us to disappear on the horizon', into which he moves with assurance, without fixed direction, finding a way. And the Stars were Shining includes fifty-nine poems marked by the valiant comedy and lyric intensity we have come to expect of Ashbery.