For a long time, I had trouble reading John Ashbery. I came into poetry with earnest seriousness, and I wanted poems to have meaning.

It's only in the last couple of years that I've realized that Ashbery's poems do have meaning — sometimes as many as a dozen meanings per poem. What his poems don't have is the kind of transparent narrative that one finds in the work of, say, Sharon Olds or Maxine Kumin or Donald Hall.

Rather than rewarding a close reading, Ashbery's poems reward a slant-reading in which one comes at the text from an angle, letting the words play across one's mind like insects on a pond. Trying to take the poems at face value can lead to a headache; letting them in from the side allows the brain to make connections between seemingly disparate things. Seen at a slant, Your Name Here is a delicious tapestry of non-sequiturs, woven with threads of wit and melancholy.

The book's first poem was the first one I fell in love with, and it may still be my favorite in the collection:

THIS ROOM

The room I entered was a dream of this room.
Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine.
The oval portrait
of a dog was me at an early age.
Something shimmers, something is hushed up.
We had macaroni for lunch every day
except Sunday, when a small quail was induced
to be served to us. Why do I tell you these things?
You are not even here.

Although "This Room" is short, it pulls me through a range of emotions. With Ashbery, I leap from seeing that there is something at the core of a dream/life that is unspoken (or unspeakable) to a line about quail that makes me think of Alice in Wonderland. And then, at the end of the poem, my laughter turns sad as the narrator wonders aloud why he speaks.

In "Terminal," Ashbery speaks again to a nameless addressee.

Didn't you get my card?
We none of us, you see, knew we were coming
until the bus was actually pulling out of the terminal.
I gazed a little sadly at the rubber of my shoes'
soles, finding it wanting.

On the first reading, I was convinced that the poem's title refers to the bus terminal in line three. The second time through, I became just as convinced that it means "terminal" in the sense of "a terminal patient" — that the poem is about aging and death. We're all terminal, Ashbery seems to be saying, and we don't know we are dying until we are already on our way.