The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt - Softcover

Clampitt, Amy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571194206 ISBN 13: 9780571194209

Publisher: FABER & FABER INC *, 1998

Synopsis

When Amy Clampitt's first book of poems, The Kingfisher, was published in January 1983, the response was jubilant. The poet was sixty-three years old, and there had been no debut like hers in recent memory. "A dance of language," said May Swenson. "A genius for places," wrote J. D. McClatchy, and the New York Times Book Review said, "With the publication of her brilliant first book, Clampitt immediately merits consideration as one of the most distinguished contemporary poets."

She went on to publish four more collections in the next eleven years, the last one, A Silence Opens, appearing in the year she died.

Now, for the first time, the five collections are brought together in a single volume, allowing us to experience anew the distinctiveness of Amy Clampitt's voice: the brilliant language--an appealing mix of formal and everyday expression--that poured out with such passion and was shaped in rhythms and patterns entirely her own.

Amy Clampitt's themes are the very American ones of place and displacement. She, like her pioneer ancestors, moved frequently, but she wrote with lasting and deep feeling about all sorts of landscapes--the prairies of her Iowa childhood, the fog-wrapped coast of Maine, and places she visited in Europe, from the western isles of Scotland to Italy's lush countryside. She lived most of her adult life in New York City, and many of her best-known poems, such as "Times Square Water Music" and "Manhattan Elegy," are set there.

She did not hesitate to take on the larger upheavals of the twentieth century--war, Holocaust, exile--and poems like "The Burning Child" and "Sed de Correr" remind us of the dark nightmare lurking in the interstices of our daily existence.

It is impossible to speak of Amy Clampitt's poetry without mentioning her immense, lifelong love of birds and wildflowers, a love that produced some of her most profound images--like the kingfisher's "burnished plunge, the color / of felicity afire," which came "glancing like an arrow / through landscapes of untended memory" to remind her of the uninhabitable sorrow of an affair gone wrong; or the sun underfoot among the sundews, "so dazzling / . . . that, looking, / you start to fall upward."

The Collected Poems offers us a chance to consider freshly the breadth of Amy Clampitt's vision and poetic achievement. It is a volume that her many admirers will treasure and that will provide a magnificent introduction for a new generation of readers.

With a foreword by Mary Jo Salter

About this title

Review:

"If Gerard Hopkins and Marianne Moore, those two uniquenesses, had married each other, they might have borne Amy Clampitt," says poet Mona Van Duyn. Certainly Hopkins's capacity for sprung rhythms wrapped around an awestruck wonder at the world seems to mesh, in Clampitt's poems, with Moore's genius for linguistic playfulness and depth of detail. Clampitt's ear is nearly unparalleled in 20th-century poets, and her delight in specificity richly rewards readers' attention. The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt brings together a lifetime of good work, and is one to treasure. Consider this excerpt from the traveling poem "Losing Track of Language": "The train leaps toward Italy; words fall away / through the dark into the dark bedroom / of everything left behind, the unendingness / of things lost track of--of who, of where-- / where I'm losing track of language."

From the Back Cover:

Reviews from five collections of poetry

"Amy Clampitt has the sensibility of a painter and the mind of a contemplative. A Keatsian luxury of detail is combined with worldly insight in the flexible texture of her lines...An assured and distinguished voice resembling no other has been added to the sum of American poetry."
--Helen Vendler

"Undeviatingly splendid. Clampitt's excellence has become a kind of standard by which the work of most contemporaries can be measured (and alas, found wanting)."
--Anthony Hecht

"Her voice is so distinctive, such a feature of the current scene, that we would probably recognize an unsigned poem of hers if we encountered it on the moon."
--Phoebe Pettingell, The Yale Review

"Amy Clampitt steps at once into the company of the major twentieth-century American poets. She is quite at home among them: with Lowell, Ransom, Warren, Plath, Bishop, Stevens."
--Frederick Turner, Poetry

About this edition

• Publisher: FABER & FABER INC *
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0571194206
• ISBN 13: 9780571194209
• Binding: Paperback