Product Description

When Amy Clampitt's first book of poems, The Kingfisher, was published in January 1983, the response was jubilant. The poet was sixty-three years old, and there had been no debut like hers in recent memory. "A dance of language," said May Swenson. "A genius for places," wrote J. D. McClatchy, and the New York Times Book Review said, "With the publication of her brilliant first book, Clampitt immediately merits consideration as one of the most distinguished contemporary poets."

She went on to publish four more collections in the next eleven years, the last one, A Silence Opens, appearing in the year she died.

Now, for the first time, the five collections are brought together in a single volume, allowing us to experience anew the distinctiveness of Amy Clampitt's voice: the brilliant language--an appealing mix of formal and everyday expression--that poured out with such passion and was shaped in rhythms and patterns entirely her own.

Amy Clampitt's themes are the very American ones of place and displacement. She, like her pioneer ancestors, moved frequently, but she wrote with lasting and deep feeling about all sorts of landscapes--the prairies of her Iowa childhood, the fog-wrapped coast of Maine, and places she visited in Europe, from the western isles of Scotland to Italy's lush countryside. She lived most of her adult life in New York City, and many of her best-known poems, such as "Times Square Water Music" and "Manhattan Elegy," are set there.

She did not hesitate to take on the larger upheavals of the twentieth century--war, Holocaust, exile--and poems like "The Burning Child" and "Sed de Correr" remind us of the dark nightmare lurking in the interstices of our daily existence.

It is impossible to speak of Amy Clampitt's poetry without mentioning her immense, lifelong love of birds and wildflowers, a love that produced some of her most profound images--like the kingfisher's "burnished plunge, the color / of felicity afire," which came "glancing like an arrow / through landscapes of untended memory" to remind her of the uninhabitable sorrow of an affair gone wrong; or the sun underfoot among the sundews, "so dazzling / . . . that, looking, / you start to fall upward."

The Collected Poems offers us a chance to consider freshly the breadth of Amy Clampitt's vision and poetic achievement. It is a volume that her many admirers will treasure and that will provide a magnificent introduction for a new generation of readers.

With a foreword by Mary Jo Salter

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #323724 in Books
• Published on: 1999-04-20
• Released on: 1999-04-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

Amazon.com Review
"If Gerard Hopkins and Marianne Moore, those two uniquenesses, had married each other, they might have borne Amy Clampitt," says poet Mona Van Duyn. Certainly Hopkins's capacity for sprung rhythms wrapped around an awestruck wonder at the world seems to mesh, in Clampitt's poems, with Moore's genius for linguistic playfulness and depth of detail. Clampitt's ear is nearly unparalleled in 20th-century poets, and her delight in specificity richly rewards readers' attention. The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt brings together a lifetime of good work, and is one to treasure. Consider this excerpt from the traveling poem "Losing Track of Language": "The train leaps toward Italy; words fall away / through the dark into the dark bedroom / of everything left behind, the unendingness / of things lost track of--of who, of where-- / where I'm losing track of language."

From Library Journal
"I find it tempting to imagine what/...the light was like," muses Clampitt in one of her finest poems, and now that her light has been tragically snuffed, we can at least be grateful to have her five books of poetry?The Kingfisher (1983), What the Light Was Like (1985), Archaic Figure (1987), Westward (1990), and A Silence Opens (1994). Collected here for the first time three years after Clampitt's death, these works represent some of the best poetry written in late- 20th-century America. A personal and affecting introduction by poet Mary Jo Salter rounds out the volume. Any library lacking Clampitt's luminous work owes it to its patrons to buy this book.?Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
... allusive, intricately wrought work... A late-starter in the tradition of Whitman and Stevens, Ms. Clampitt was a published poet for only the last 11 years of her life. But her output is as remarkable for its range as for its excellence.... Ms. Clampitt's brilliant variety, her graceful wit, are abundantly evident in this rich harvest of her works. -- The Wall Street Journal, Merle Rubin

...a rare and enduring achievement ... Clampitt is, among other things, a poet to learn from. -- The Economist

78
Alders
Alice
Amaranth And Moly
Amherst
An Anatomy Of Migraine
The Anniversary
Ano Prinios
Antiphonal
Archaic Figure
At A Rest Stop In Ohio
At Easterly
At Muker, Upper Swaledale
Athena
Atlas Immobilized
The August Darks
Babel Aboard The Hellas International Express
Balms
A Baroque Sunburst
Bayou Afternoon
Beach Glass
The Beach Pea
Beethoven, Opus 111
Berceuse
Bertie Goes Hunting
Birdham
Black Buttercups
Blueberrying In August
Botanical Nomenclature
Brought From Beyond
Burial In Cypress Hills
The Burning Child
A Cadenza
Camouflage
Cloudberry Summer
Coleorton
Continental Drift
The Cooling Tower
The Cormorant In Its Element
The Cove
A Cure At Porlock
A Curfew
The Dahlia Gardens
The Dakota
Dallas-fort Worth: Redbud And Mistletoe
Dancers Exercising
Dejection: A Footnote
Deleted Passage
Discovery
Dodona: Asked Of The Oracle
Easedale Tarn
Easter Morning
The Edge Of The Hurricane
'eighty-nine
The Elgin Marbles
Exmoor
The Field Pansy
Fireweed
Fog
From A Clinic Waiting Room
George Eliot Country
The Godfather Returns To Color Tv
Good Friday
Gooseberry Fool
Gradual Clearing
Grasmere
Grasses
Green
A Hairline Fracture
The Halloween Parade
Handed Down
Having Lunch At Brasenose
He Dreams Of Being Warm
A Hedge Of Rubber Trees
A Hermit Thrush
The Hickory Grove
High Culture
High Noon
Highgate Cemetery
Hippocrene
Hispaniola
Homeland
Homer, A.d. 1982
The Horned Rampion
The Hurricane And Charlotte Mew
Imago
In Umbria: A Snapshot
Iola, Kansas
The Isle Of Wight
John Donne In California
Keats At Chichester
The Kingfisher
Kudzu Dormant
Leaving Yannina
Let The Air Circulate
Letters From Jerusalem
Lindenbloom
The Local Genius
London Inside And Outside
Losing Track Of Language
Low Tide At Schoodic
Man Feeding Pigeons
Manhattan: Charles Street
Manhattan: Grace Church
Manhattan: The Staten Island Ferry
Margaret Fuller, 1847
Margate
Marginal Employment
Marine Surface, Low Overcast
Matoaka
Matrix (villa Serbelloni, Lake Como)
Meadowlark Country
Medusa
Medusa At Broadstairs
Meridian
Midsummer In The Blueberry Barrens
A Minor Tremor
Mulciber At West Egg
My Cousin Muriel
The Nereids Of Seriphos
A New Life
Nondescript
North Fork
A Note From Leyden
Nothing Stays Put
The Odessa Steps
The Olive Groves Of Thasos
Olympia
On The Disadvantages Of Central Heating
Or Consider Prometheus
The Outer Bar
Palm Sunday
Perseus
Perseus Airborne
Portola Valley
The Prairie
A Procession At Candlemas
Progress At Building Site With (fewer) Pigeons
The Quarry
Rain At Bellagio
Real Estate
The Reedbeds Of The Hackensack
Remembering Greece
The Reservoirs Of Mount Helicon
A Resumption, Or Possibly A Remission
Ringing Doorbells
Runes, Blurs, Sap Rising
Rydal Mount
The Sacred Hearth Fire
Saloniki
Salvage
Savannah
A Scaffold
Sea Mouse
Sed De Correr
Seder Night
Seed
Seriphos Unvisited
Shorebirds In Seasonal Plumage Observed Through Binoculars
A Silence
Slow Motion
The Smaller Orchid
The Spruce Has No Taproot
Stacking The Straw
The Subway Singer
The Sun Underfoot Among The Sundews
Sunday Music
Syrinx
Teignmouth
Tempe In The Rain
Tepoztlan
Thermopylae
Thinking Red
Tidewater Winter
Time
Times Square Water Music
Townhouse Interior With Cat
The Underworld Of Dante: Canto 9
Urn-burial And The Butterfly Migration
Vacant Lot With Pokeweed
Vacant Lot With Tumbleweed And Pigeons
Venice Revisited
Voyages
The War Memorial
Westward
What The Light Was Like
A Whippoorwill In The Woods
White
Winchester: The Autumn Equinox
A Winter Burial
Witness
The Woodlot
Written In Water
Copyright© 1998 Roth Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved -- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

With the passage of time, the wonder of Clampitt's late appearance in print and the poignancy of her quick departure from it will both recede, allowing readers to come to terms with the kind of poet she was, and is. -- The New York Times Book Review, Christopher Benfey

Customer Reviews

Swoonworthy
Amy Clampitt sure-handedly set the gold standard for poetry in the waning decades of the twentieth century. Her work is a universe of grace. I've got three copies of this one--one for the bedside table, one for sneaking reacquaintance in the lower-left drawer of my office desk, and another for the slow-crawling intervals of the commute. When it comes to poetry, there haven't exactly been too many essential collections of late. But this is one.

A Great and Idiosyncratic Poet
Amy Clampitt was an American original. Both her life and her poetry demand serious attention. Having all of her five volumes in one big, beautiful book means that a reader can take the measure of (and derive pleasure from) the woman who was America's oldest "young" poet, who did not publish her first book until she was 63. Now that her letters have also been published, we can get a sense of the woman behind the pen. Both the letters and, even more fully, the poems, attest to the deep humanity of a wonderful writer.

What the Light Was Like: Remembering Amy Clampitt's mind
Now here in one gorgeous volume is 496 pages of proof that this original and curious intellect once lived among us, and, having looked (and looked) at our time and many places, left us these hard-headed, light-filled poems.