John Ashbery
Shadow Train: Poems.
The Viking Press, 1981. First edition. 0670637866 50 pages.
Volume, measuring approximately 6.25" x 8.25", is bound in quarter dark green cloth and gray paper-covered boards, with stamped silver lettering to spine and author's initials blind stamped on front cover. Book displays light shelfwear. Binding is firm. Pages are clean and bright. Dust jacket, with price of $8.95 on front flap, shows light shelfwear. Jacket is preserved in mylar cover. 
"Following important accomplishments in various long forms, notably the major poems that distinguished his last three books, John Ashbery collects here fifty poems of identical short length. Each sixteen-line poem touches on aspects of the recurring themes in this great poet's work: the contradictions and paradoxes of language and experience, and their strange, lyric beauty. As the poem entitled "Paradoxes and Oxymorons" has it, the poems are concerned with "language on a very plain level," and the "deeper outside" things, or as the title poem says, "the truth inside meaning." These are fifty jewels -- poems of innovative, inventive and always revelatory beauty."