Westward - Hardcover

Clampitt, Amy

3.73

37 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0394584554 ISBN 13: 9780394584553

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990

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Poems deal with nature, migration, the West, wildflowers, travel, mortality, change, and the prairie

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From the Back Cover:

"Brilliant descriptive poet from the first, each touching detail of the outfit the world wears disclosed in unexpected reality by her metaphoric lights -- what more could the world want from her? Later collections broadened to light up human figures, the human drama, for these, too, so far, the world cherishes. But it was the East, the unfamiliar, that set her free to see, and the East that she saw for us. In Westward she takes on an extraordinary challenge: to illuminate her Iowa past, the rural backdrop, the stoic 'hinterland'... In poem after poem she returns to the scene that 'daunts' her, and her familiar guides rush to her assistance -- Keats, Coleridge, James, Chekhov, Emerson -- along with a deepening sense of history and a new 'spiritual widening.' The oats, the plantain, the people, the hard past, yield to their poet. Believe me, Amy Clampitt can do anything!"

From Library Journal:

"Nothing stays put," writes Clampitt in a poem from her fourth collection: "All that we know, that we're/ made of, is motion." It is against this motion, particularly the westward movement that seems to drive the fates of both humans and wildlife, that the poet holds her "frail wick of Metaphor." But given Clampitt's well-established reputation for opulent language and rich, almost heady, description, the claim to frailty is disingenuous indeed. Though many poems rely on the now-familiar wildflower litanies that typify much current poetry, Clampitt's interest in transplants ("what had been alien begins/ as it alters, to grow as though it were indigenous") adds an extra dimension to a book that grows gradually stranger as the reader's imagination travels through it.
-Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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