After receiving wide acclaim and numerous awards during the early and middle years of his career, John Ashbery continued to strike out in new directions in the 1990s, writing in a style at once playful and cerebral, relaxed and precise, dreamlike in its imagery and associations yet exquisitely attuned to mundane reality. Here in one authoritative annotated volume are seven complete collections from this crucial period in which he solidified his standing among the greatest of American poets.

The volume begins with the landmark book-length poem Flow Chart (1991), a stunning tour de force that reveals Ashbery’s mastery of “the entire orchestral potential of the English language,” as Helen Vendler writes. Weaving a spell through its long lines, which unfold in mesmerizing and surprising ways, Flow Chart offers an account of the poet’s mind that complements Ashbery’s earlier Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror but also provides a vision of the collective “dream of everyday life that was our / beginning, and where we still live, out in the open, under clouds stacked up in a holding pattern / like pictures in a nineteenth-century museum.” As Benjamin Kunkel observes, “Anyone who cares about what’s going on in American literature must sit down . . . and read the poem through.” Prepared in consultation with the author, this edition restores a missing page—thirty-eight lines in all—inadvertently dropped during the revision process of the poem for its first publication.

Ashbery’s poems from the 1990s range brilliantly across his varied interests and obsessions—opera, film noir, French poetry, and the visual arts, most notably the work of the outsider artist Henry Darger, the point of departure for the book-length poem Girls on the Run (1999). In evidence at every turn are Ashbery’s seemingly boundless inventiveness, a pitch-perfect ear for American speech, and an exuberant erudition that transports the reader to unexpected places.

Rounding out the volume is a selection of twenty-six uncollected poems, among them “Hoboken,” a collage poem that mischievously pillages Roget’s Thesaurus, “The Hailstorm in Belgrade, May 24th 1937,” inspired by a remote memory of a Life magazine article Ashbery read as a nine-year-old, and “Victrola floribunda,” first published opposite a reproduction of a painting of an imaginary flower by the artist Dorothea Tanning, for which it provided the name.