Usu­ally I do my best not to let this web­site degen­er­ate into a mere atten­tion redi­rec­tion device, but I feel com­pelled beyond pru­dence to rec­om­mend “Dreamlife With­out Angels,” Ange Mlinko’s review of John Ashbery’s Notes from the Air for The Nation. The review isn’t going to stand the world on its head—not even the narrow world of Ash­bery criticism—but it’s a beau­ti­ful exam­ple of the form.

Mlinko begins with this gem of a hook:

Every year that the Nobel com­mit­tee passes over poet John Ash­bery for a socially respon­si­ble nov­el­ist, it proves that the prize for lit­er­a­ture is just an arm of the Peace Prize, rather than–like the Nobels for physics or chemistry—a prize for rad­i­cal dis­cov­ery in the field.

She fin­ishes, barely winded, on this note:

As a dis­cred­ited theory of space, ether at least had spir­i­tual solace. I doubt many read­ers of this mag­a­zine shed tears for the death of God, but what do poets do in the absence of tran­scen­dent belief? Our jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for an art nei­ther pop­u­lar nor remu­ner­a­tive depends on a wager some­thing like Pascal’s: why not bet on one life to gain two?

Ash­bery has made this wager, and the con­se­quences are damn­ing for those of us who should have moved on, who should have suc­cumbed by now to the cheer­ful util­i­tar­i­an­ism that cap­i­tal­ism and tech­nol­ogy promise us. The promise Ash­bery holds out to us is this: lit­er­a­ture keeps set­ting the bar for our dreams not higher, but elsewhere.

Notes from the Air is a selec­tion of poems Ash­bery chose from his last twenty years of work (from April Galleons on). Whether his fans need it will depend on what kind of fan they are: casual (yes), seri­ous (no), or fanatic (yes). But any or all of them might be inter­ested in the new Con­junc­tions, which fea­tures an Ash­bery port­fo­lio that includes trib­utes by Brian Even­son, Eileen Myles, Chris­t­ian Hawkey, and others.