John Ashbery's poetry elicits such extravagant praise or scorn that a reviewer may be hard-pressed to approach his new book undistracted by partisan vehemence.

	"WHERE SHALL I WANDER" By John Ashbery Ecco ($22.95)

A widely published poet and adventurous editor becomes spitting mad at the mention of Ashbery: "That emperor has no clothes!"

The opposite view is evident in the accolades of critics such as Harold Bloom:

"Ashbery seems to be to the second half of our century what Stevens and Yeats were to the first," calling Ashbery "America's greatest living poet."

Yet I admit to a lack of strong feelings about the collection which seems to me decidedly unexciting.

Ashbery's "methodology," so jarring and elliptical early on, now has the smooth fluency of long practice.

His characteristic poem is made of shrewdly well-crafted (and often gorgeous) phrases and lines that seem to have been cut up and tossed like salad ingredients, then re-amalgamated into orderly syntactical structures so they have the look and sound of coherent passages.

Rhetorical as an attorney, persuasive as an ambassador, in his recent work Ashbery sounds wry, cosmopolitan, and genteel.

Ashbery frequently sideswipes expectations by mangling sense while maintaining an entirely reasonable manner and posture, mixing the range of diction from literary sophisticate to vaudevillian screwball:

In prose or verse form, these new poems are lucidly phrased and paced. But there's an overall air of ennui acknowledged in the title of one poem, "Sonnet: More of Same."

Marvelously well written, adroit in translating natural or worldly details into artistic emblems, and never averse to puns, these poems have a distinctive mild-mannered braininess.

Their rueful tone is poignant, and their learnedness understated and self-effacing, but this reader kept feeling that the poet is relying upon tried-and-true talent, moseying along.

The most beguiling of Ashbery's gifts is a mockingbird ability to echo motley snatches from conversations, advertisements, bulletins, therapy sessions, or official edicts, mimicking that cacophony bombarding us day in and day out.

Finally, near the book's conclusion, in the clustered prose paragraphs of the title piece, the fastidious urbanity of preceding poems seems to break apart, with a jack-o'-lantern grin both urgent and menacing:

This is so very different in temper, the imagery astringent and convulsive, with audible anguish.

A case is often made by Ashbery's enthusiasts that his writing disrupts ordinary habits of thinking and requires a reader to wake up, short-circuiting complacency, but except for when reading the title poem, where I do feel awaked and short-circuited, in general Ashbery's cerebral new poems seem like painstakingly made lace doilies, more decorative than enlightening.