Product Description

A new long poem from one of America's greatest and most honored living poets. Glare comprises two superb parts by the contemporary master of this form: "Strip" and "Scat Scan." It demonstrates, yet again, why A. R. Ammons's poetic voice is a national treasure: by turns cosmic, self-inflating, self-deflating, eloquent, intimate, bawdy, comic, precise and always unmistakably his own.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #984123 in Books
• Published on: 1997-07
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 294 pages

Amazon.com
Harold Bloom, one of this country's most respected literary critics, has this to say: "No contemporary poet, in America, is likelier to become a classic than A. R. Ammons." With Glare, Ammons once again has proven himself a master of the long poem, the short line, and a deep and sympathetic humor in the face of life's absurdities. Ammons wants you to understand that your life, and the lives of those you love, would mean nothing to any of the sizable meteors that could crash into the earth at any time, killing us all, but he doesn't stop there. The cosmic game is stunningly vast, he writes, and, after all "it is / nice to be included, especially from / so minor a pew: please turn, in yr / hymnals, to page 'archie carrying on / again' ..." Ammons is a great poet not content to rest on his laurels.

From Library Journal
In his 1968 essay, "A Poem Is a Walk," Ammons described poetry as being able to incorporate "contradictions, inconsistencies, explanations." His long poems demonstrate that theory, leaving him room to be humanist, philosopher, scientist, naturalist, teacher, family man, and sexual being. Writing in his familiar couplets on another roll of adding-machine tape, he reminds readers of his last book-length poem, Garbage (1993 National Book Award winner). He wants "Strip" to be akin to litter, however, casually strewn everywhere: "I have plenty and/ give plenty away, why, because here/ at nearly 70 stuff has bunched up/ with who knows how much space to/ spread out into." Or, again: "strip typing is/ like strip mining: you peel the/ surface off things shoving clutterment/ downhill." "Scat Scan," the book's shorter poem, is harder to pin down. Again, Ammons is discursive, delighting in wordplay. He sums up his life through twisted proverbs and ingeniously echoes Frost's two most famous poems, "The Road Not Taken" and "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening." As with all of Ammons's books, this volume is essential.?Rochelle Ratner, formerly Poetry Editor, "Soho Weekly News," New York
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From The Boston Review
In contrast to his previous book-length poem Garbage (1993), "the central // image of this poem is that it has no / mound gathering stuff up but strews // itself across a random plain randomly." The lack of a sustaining centrality through 300 pages of couplets is at times unsatisfying, and Ammons knows it: "I just feel so / broken down." But at 71, Ammons is more playful than ever--like "breezes in the treezes"--and the deep play in Glare breaks through the "crises of fear" into some of his most astonishing and self-knowing lyric: "you // have to be careful of transcendentalists: on / one side of their goofiness is carnal misery // and on the other the prettiest high slides / glee ever broke out of." As his knowing becomes the doing, Ammons extends the reach of his lyrical gift, and his expression of hope becomes the enactment of its own fulfillment: "I could spell out / my dream along a good line some beauty // might take a turn to, and then we / would be toe to toe on the floor, // the music swaying us and educating / our wishes and edging us toward the // closure that is our temporary but / essential solution."
Copyright © 1996, Boston Review. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

idiosyncratic brilliance
Here this master of the book-length poem constructs a long poem different from other long poems of his, at the height of his command over poetics. This is a book of thoughts; he prefers the word in a conceptual space over the word as image. He also has a crazy sense of humor. Sections of this long poem are sectioned into very small units, & the form of 2-line stanzas is almost (but not quite) constanr throughout the book. The poems move as you would imagine the sphere on the cover would roll -- with a steady, hard arcing sound. I don't know this for sure yet, but I have a feeling Ammons liked associating his poetry with spheres so much because spheres are the shapes with the greatest surface area to volume ratio, & his words are just as voluminous in their terseness. In other news, his poetry in this book is its own very exciting avant-garde. Until his death on 25 Feb, 2001, more & more throughout his life, he was always creating wholly new spaces for poetry to move through. This his last book keeps moving.

climax of genius
The writing in this book all bears Ammons's mark of experimental, architectonic genius. He writes with severe intellect & a kooky sense of humor. He tends to prefer abstract thinking to emotion or physical objects or location. Gripping read.

Spectacular vistas (democratic visas)
Ammons was a master of the concise lyric, the witty aphorism, and the unusual nature narrative: a dialogue between a man and a mountain, for example. But he shines in his long poems, his book-length poems, of which "Glare" is the final example. The poem enacts the workings of an expansive supple probing ever-restless mind as it turns over all that comes at it centripetally as if it occupied the center of the universe. In a sense he did that as well as any American poet since Robert Frost. That is one measure of his greatness. There are others in the glare of mourning.