Selected poems

A. R. Ammons; David Lehman, editor

ISBN 10: 1931082936 / ISBN 13: 9781931082938

Published by New York : Library of America, c2006., 2006

About this Item

ISBN 1931082936. Small hardcover copy in near fine condition with near fine condition dustjacket. Black mark on bottom edge of pages about one inch long. Section 3 Shelf 2. Seller Inventory # 6001182

Bibliographic Details

Title: Selected poems

Publisher: New York : Library of America, c2006.

Publication Date: 2006

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Fine

Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included

Edition: 1st Edition

About this title

Synopsis:

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.

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About the Author:

Archie Randolph Ammons (1926-2001) twice won the National Book Award for poetry in a career that extended over five decades and more than two dozen published works.

David Lehman has been the series editor of The Best American Poetry since its creation in 1988. His books of poetry include New and Selected Poems, When a Woman Loves a Man, and The Daily Mirror. He teaches in the New School graduate writing program in New York City.