John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975)

No one now writing poetry in the English language is likelier than Ashbery to survive the severe judgments of time. . . . He is joining that American sequence that includes Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, and Hart Crane.

Charles Wright, Black Zodiac (1997)

Black Zodiac concentrates Charles Wright's considerable poetic endowment into a new poignance that has to be termed religious. Some of the poems achieve an authentic gnosis in a rapt mode of negative transcendence.