THE MOORING OF STARTING OUT: The First Five Books of Poetry.<i> By John Ashbery</i> .<i> Ecco Press: 392 pp., $25</i>

Good writing is an assault on cliche. It is one of the richest, if not the most singular virtue of John Ashbery even in his first five books of poetry--”Some Trees” (1956), “The Tennis Court Oath” (1962), “Rivers and Mountains” (1967), “The Double Dream of Spring” (1970) and “Three Poems” (1972)--of which “The Mooring of Starting Out” is a full compilation, spanning the first 16 years of Ashbery’s career. A teacher at Bard College, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, as well as National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award winner, Ashbery has in fact written 16 books of poetry to date. Ashbery turns 70 this year, a good time for a retrospective.

One is not surprised to find that autobiography plays largely in Ashbery’s early poetry. “The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers”

Yet I cannot escape the picture

Of my small self in that bank of flowers:

My head among the blazing phlox

Seemed a pale and gigantic fungus.

I had a hard stare, accepting

Everything, taking nothing . . .

--shows the circumspect boy we meet again in “And You Know,” who becomes the difficult, enigmatic poet who “wears a question in his left eye” in the brilliant “He”:

He hears the weak cut down with a smile.

He waltzes tragically on the spitting housetops.

He is never near. What you need

He cancels with the air of one making a salad.

“Some Trees” has a lot of Hemingway’s “In Our Time” about it, with its pithy disclosures in which Ashbery tends to see himself as a boy, a son, a small dreamer. I admire “How Much Longer Will I Be Able to Inhabit the Divine Sepulcher . . . “ which could have been a great poem if Ashbery had as much regard for his readers as he does for himself; much of the poem is willfully obscure.

“The Tennis Court Oath” with its bewildering poems, many so subjective as to be truly incomprehensible, deals with the transparency of the self and its location in all things, in tight demanding verses that, with their insistence on seeing the world as emblematic, call to mind 19th century Transcendentalism. Shadowy reality is, I suppose, at the best of times rarely accessible, but the fragmentary phrase and unfinished line and gulped thought and lost allusion and empty word Ashbery was used to employing long before David Mamet, such as in “Night”:

Ordeal a home and

My lake and sat down

We must the gin came faster in cups

Under the scissors mill just like you was sixteen

In the orange flowers a pale narcissus hung

You was saying the alligators the grove

And he plied a rod out of the grey

Fishing manure . . .

along with his arbitrary use of punctuation and grammar--he will sometimes use a period and sometimes not (Yeats, Eliot, Stevens, innovators all, never once, to my recollection, chose to be so precious and pointlessly ungettable)--can become nothing less than infuriating. I would even assert it is morally indefensible. For a writer to write codswallop? Jabber? Try on these lines from the prose poem “The Ascetic Sensualists”:

“Only a small edge of dime protected the issued utter blank darkness from the silver regal porch factory inscribed pearl-handled revolver raped gun to the ultimate tease next to the door fifth gum. Your Balzac open the foot scrounge lamp tube traffic gun. Gun is over, war banished, tottering lamp gun. Hic the perfect screw slow giggles to be sky raffia. The person or persons molested.”

Such impenetrable poems, reminding one of the likes of Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, the queen of tautology, and yam-in -the-mouth Charles Olsen, a total fraud, and Louis Zukofsky of whose uncircumscribable poem “A” critic Hugh Kenner once admiringly pronounced, “Critics will take a thousand years to solve it”--he meant this as praise--are nothing less than irresponsible, at least to my mind and defeat the whole idea of writing as an act of communication. Ashbery’s major Zukofskian effort in my opinion is “Europe” (“He had mistaken his book for garbage” is one of its apposite lines), except for the wordy, paragraphoidal last efforts in “Three Poems,” which include “The New Spirit,” “The System” and “The Recital,” which remind me more than anything of the late poet John Berryman’s impossibly dull literary criticism, impenetrable walls of gibberish and jargon. I am certain Ashbery is incapable of a lyric poem. With such an obfuscating drive, how is it even possible?

But what about his assault on cliche? He dares, he dreams, he devises. There are masterful poems. “The Painter,” “These Lacustrine Cities,” “Civilization and Its Discontents,” the witty “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape”--a rare example of easy humor and good fun in Ashbery--and “Into the Dusk-Charged Air” and “Illustration” are good examples. And he is capable of such fabulous lines. “In the foul air/each snowflake seems a Piranesi”; “The way September moves a lace curtain to be near a pear”; “I miss the human truth in your smile”; “The night is cold and delicate and full of angels/Pounding down the living”; “Perfume my head with forgetting all about me”; “Even as you lick the stamp/A brown dog lies down beside you and dies”; and these incomparably lovely lines from “Illustration”:

Much that is beautiful must be discarded

So that we may resemble a taller

Impression of ourselves. Moths climb in the flame,

Alas, that wish only to be the flame . . .

In his early books, the younger Ashbery loves white imagery, flowers, night, desolation and lost dreams, the changing aspects of skies and what they reveal. His many references to painters and painting in these first five volumes foreshadow the later, mightier poet of the highly touted “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” (1975). Ashbery, who has versatility, can do the poet in different voices. “Clepsydra” approximates an essay. “Ice Skaters,” one of his more successful Whitmanesque--and easily one of his best--poems, is a sort of dramatic monologue, full of rich slang and power, “which is in the form of falling snow.” “Idaho” is a small novel. “Into the Dusk-Charged Air” is a litany, in which, chanting the square deific, he defines what is characteristic of each of the major rivers of the world. “It Was Raining in the Capital” is in the simple ABCB of 16 quatrains. “Variations, Calypso and Fugue on a Theme of Ella Wheeler Wilcox”, autobiographical, chatty and colloquial, has all the locutions of a personal letter, complete with anecdotes of travel. And “Decoy” with its proclamatory devices is very like a political harangue.

In Ashbery’s poems, we are given a life we have to face and must look to so with grace. The machine age coopts us. (From “Soonest Method”: “Barely tolerated, living on the margin/In our technological society, we were always having to be rescued/On the brink of destruction, like heroines in Orlando Furioso”) Flux as menace. (From “The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers”: “For as change is horror,/Virtue is really stubbornness.”). Isolation. (From “French Poems”: “We live our lives, made up of a great quantity of isolated instants/So as to be lost at the heart of a multitude of things.”). The past as the location of truth and comfort. (From: “Definition of Blue”: “There is no remedy for this ‘packaging’ which has supplanted the old sensations”).

Preventing ingress, the worst aspect of preciosity, in my opinion, may be the hazard of the very ingenuity the poet strives to find in avoiding cliche and hackneyed usage, and in reading these early books, it is often clear to me that Ashbery in trying to achieve the latter falls prey to the former. The five volumes gathered in “The Mooring of Starting Out” with its oxymoronic title--it is the final line of “Soonest Mended”--embody, nevertheless, much of what Ashbery was doing well into his early 40s, which in the arc of a poet’s life, most poets’ lives, in any case, is later than middle age.