Glare - Hardcover

Ammons, A. R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393040968 ISBN 13: 9780393040968

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997

Synopsis

"Glare is a high-energy, relentlessly self-aware collision with the whole of life."―Albert Mobilio, Salon

A superb long poem by the contemporary master of the form, Glare comprises two sections, "Strip" and "Scat Scan." The poem 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.

About this title

About the Author

A. R. Ammons’s (1926–2001) was a two-time winner of the National Book Award and the recipient of a National Book Critics Circle Award. His many additional honors include the Academy of American Poets’ Wallace Stevens Award, the Bollingen Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Robert Frost Medal, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations.

Reviews

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393040968
• ISBN 13: 9780393040968
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304