Product Description

A final collection of poems considers the splendors and nightmares of the world and focuses and such topics as Maine fog, a bayou afternoon, and the waning old Greenwich Village crowd. Reprint.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3097429 in Books
• Published on: 1996-02-27
• Released on: 1996-02-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback

From Publishers Weekly
When Clampitt ( What the Light Was Like ) turns to the legend of Pocahontas in her poem, "Matoaka," to uncover the woman behind the "bronze-immobilized, the heathen / princess, demure in / feathered deerskin" who has become little more now than "bric-a-brac," she finds that history, like language, needs continual reformulation: "As words do, / the words we used once, whatever they / once stood for gone. / Begin again. Go back to Majesty, / the word personified, a woman." In line with this credo, Clampitt's gravely luminous fifth volume of poems dwells, with an extraordinary certainty of language, on the uncertain texture of living. Color suffuses an evocative sequence of poems: in "White," that color of "the mirror-haunch of / pronghorn" leads next, in "Green," to the "half-membranous / sheen of birth" and then, in "Thinking Red," to "the clotted winter melancholy / of the sumac; hawthorn encrimsoned, / dogwood beaded." Finally, in "Nondescript," even the lack of color approaches an "in-betweenness, this process that's less / an advent than it is a wandering vaguely." Clampitt's landscape is still and painterly, a canvas suggestive of elegy and mourning as "the mind gropes toward its own recessional." And though her mood is somber, her rhythms are exhilarating: the poems dance with intensity as she calls up abbreviated syllabics, pointillist images, staccato litanies, parenthetical asides and quixotic questions begging: "For what? Can someone tell us?"
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Clampitt is a mature writer now offering her fifth collection of poems (following Westward , LJ 3/15/90), but she retains an adolescent's giddy enthusiam for words. Over the years, her language has grown more abstruse, her phrases more impacted; the dense, multifaceted works that result will stump some readers and enthrall others. It can take some digging to figure out what Clampitt is after, though it's worth it; here, she is frequently concerned with historical and literary context and spiritual quest. One particularly ambitious poem, Seed , shows the range of Clampitt's methods and the intricacy of her concerns; it moves from a fine description of "the elm trees' chaffy currency to a woman death and implied rape to the link between sex and religion to Walt Whitman, "celebrating his procreative urge" as he commandeers American literature. Perhaps the first poem, "Syrinx" has the last word on Clampitt's work as it describes "pure vowel/ breaking free of the dry, the merely fricative/ husk of the particular, rise/ past saying anything, and/ more than the wind in/ the trees." Here is poetry not as a commendation of being but simply as being itself. Important for anyone who reads poetry.
- Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Clampitt's fifth collection is like a series of densely detailed and scumbled frescoes depicting the metamorphoses and enigmas of myths and miracles. Clampitt writes trenchantly about the layering of history as evident in place-names and the stories of individuals caught at the crossroads, such as Pocahontas and Captain John Smith. She also loves odd juxtapositions. In "Discovery," she connects the torpor of a floating manatee with the roaring liftoff of a space shuttle; in "Manhattan," she evokes the seethe of the streets and exposes the tricky chemistry of relationships by turning feelings into fruit into cells into gems and back again. Clampitt's rhythms are tight, beating like the wings of birds, the whirl of dry leaves, the rush of waves. She is dramatic and wry and always in motion. States of ambivalence, imprecision, flux, transition, and "blurred margins" intrigue her. So she loves spring and fall, mist and murk, and "that glimpsed inkling of things/beyond systems, windborne, oblivious." These are poems to grapple with, stare at, read out loud, and, finally, surrender to until "a silence opens" and we hear anew. Donna Seaman