Diversifications

Diversifications is a collection of shorter poems by the poet whose Collected Poems won the National Book Award.

The poems are on a diversity of subjects, but through them all runs the strong unity of vision that has led critic Geoffrey Hartman to acclaim Ammons as "a major American poet" (New York Times Book Review). "If his importance was suspected before," wrote the poet John Ashbery in The New York Review of Books, "it is now confirmed." Ammons came late to poetry, and has come even more lately into national recognition. That recognition is solid, however, and can only be increased by this, his latest volume.

A. R. Ammons (1926–2001), author of many books of poetry, won a Bollingen Prize; two National Book Awards; a National Book Critics Circle Award; a Library of Congress Prize for Poetry; a Wallace Stevens Award; and a Robert Frost Medal. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and taught at Cornell University.