JOHN ASHBERY, a native of Rochester, New York, has lived since 1958 in Paris, where he is art critic for the New York herald tribune European edition and for Art International of Zurich. He spent two earlier years in France as a Fulbright fellow, in Montpellier and Paris; he has also been connected with Art News in New York and with two American publishing houses, Oxford University Press and McGraw-Hill. He is a graduate of Harvard and has done advanced work at Columbia and N.Y.U., specializing in French literature. His poems have appeared in various magazines and in privately printed collections. The present book is his second. Its predecessor was Some Trees (Yale Series of Younger Poets, 1956)- "the most beautiful first book to appear in America," said Poetry Magazine, "since [Wallace Stevens'] Harmonium."