Product Description

Meditative, comic, emotionally wrenching, steeped in both the natural world and the life of the mind, the poetry of A. R. Ammons is at once cosmic in scope and intimate in its moment-to-moment transformations. With his mastery of description and cadence, his roiling wit and fearless gaze, Ammons was a philosopher of the everyday who found surprise everywhere he looked. "He is often witty, sometimes bawdy," writes editor David Lehman, "on a perpetual quest to find forms capacious enough for an imagination intent on finding a place for everything."

A compound, in editor David Lehman's words, of "wisdom, pathos, humor, mortal longing, and intimations of immortality," the work of A. R. Ammons is like nothing else in modern American poetry. Ammons's tireless formal invention and restless curiosity about every aspect of nature and of the mind are embodied in poetry that is effortlessly accessible and generous in its impulses. Whether spreading out in the long forms of Tape for the Turn of the Year or Garbage, or honing his perceptions down to the extreme brevity of his shorter lyrics, he holds tight to his vision of the way "all day / life itself is bending, / weaving, changing, / adapting, failing, / succeeding."

This new selection covering the whole range of Ammons's career offers a superb introduction to the pleasures and surprises of his work. His uncanny ability to balance wide-ranging abstract speculation with meticulous observation of natural phenomena, in poetry that encompasses moods of tragic pathos, low comedy, and seemingly casual profundity marks him as one of the preeminent figures in our recent literature

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #107108 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 130 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781931082938
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Ammons (1926-2001) was a difficult figure to pin down. While unassociated with any particular poetic school or group, he picked up threads from Whitman, Williams, Frost and Stevens, weaving them into poetry all his own: equal parts pastoral meditation, philosophical speculation and homespun resignation. In the process, he won nearly every honor a major American poet can. Now, in the first selection to present samplings from the whole of his oeuvre (which ranges from two-line lyrics to book-length sequences), we can survey the extent is his poetic powers. Speaking like an earthy philosopher, Ammons renders vivid portrayals of man's interaction with nature ("...seedheads crushed by tires/.../ so many seeds, and not one will make a/ tree"), yielding humbling metaphysical observations: "...wind doesn't whistle, brother! brother!" The same mischievously sobering sensibility offers clipped, humorous takes on interpersonal relations, as in the six word gem "Their Sex Life": "One failure on/ Top of Another". In this small volume-the 20th in The Library of America's American Poets Project series-Lehman, poet and editor of the annual Best American Poetry anthologies, succeeds in giving a sense of Ammons' range and major themes, while pointing the reader toward Ammons' original books, which deserve to be read from cover to cover.
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