The Collected Poems Of Amy Clampitt.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Clampitt, Amy

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American poetry--20th century.

American poetry.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.

Summary:

Now, for the first time, Clammpitt's five poetry collections are brought together in a single volume, allowing us to experience anew the distinctiveness of her 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. - With a foreword by Mary Jo Salter 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. 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. 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."

Contents:

Intro

Title Page

Copyright

Contents

Foreword by Mary Jo Salter

The Kingfisher (1983)

I - Fire and Water

The Cove

Fog

Gradual Clearing

The Outer Bar

Sea Mouse

Beach Glass

Marine Surface, Low Overcast

The Sun Underfoot Among the Sundews

Botanical Nomenclature

On the Disadvantages of Central Heating

Meridian

A Resumption, or Possibly a Remission

A Procession at Candlemas

The Dakota

Times Square Water Music

II - Airborne, Earthbound

The Edge of the Hurricane

Amaranth and Moly

Salvage

Balms

Lindenbloom

The Cormorant in Its Element

Camouflage

The Kingfisher

The Smaller Orchid

A Hairline Fracture

Exmoor

Dancers Exercising

Slow Motion

Sunday Music

Beethoven, Opus 111

III - Heartland

The Quarry

The Woodlot

Imago

The Local Genius

Stacking the Straw

IV - Triptych

Palm Sunday

Good Friday

Easter Morning

V - Watersheds

Marginal Employment

Tepoztlán

Remembering Greece

The Reservoirs of Mount Helicon

Trasimene

Rain at Bellagio

VI - Hydrocarbon

Or Consider Prometheus

The Anniversary

Letters from Jerusalem

Berceuse

The Dahlia Gardens

The Burning Child

What the Light Was Like (1985)

I - The Shore

A Baroque Sunburst

The August Darks

Low Tide at Schoodic

Bertie Goes Hunting

Cloudberry Summer

Gooseberry Fool

The Spruce Has No Taproot

What the Light Was Like

II - The Hinterland

Black Buttercups

Witness

From a Clinic Waiting Room

A Curfew

Urn-Burial and the Butterfly Migration

The Cooling Tower

A New Life

High Culture

III - Voyages: A Homage to John Keats

Margate

Teignmouth

The Elgin Marbles

Chichester

He Dreams of Being Warm

The Isle of Wight

Winchester: The Autumn Equinox

Voyages

IV - The Metropolis.

The Reedbeds of the Hackensack

Burial in Cypress Hills

The Godfather Returns to Color TV

Real Estate

A Scaffold

Vacant Lot with Tumbleweed and Pigeons

Ringing Doorbells

Townhouse Interior with Cat

Time

Homer, A.D. 1982

V - Written in Water

The Hickory Grove

Losing Track of Language

Written in Water

A Cure at Porlock

The Sacred Hearth Fire

Let the Air Circulate

Archaic Figure (1987)

I - Hellas

Archaic Figure

The Olive Groves of Thasos

Ano Prinios

Tempe in the Rain

Olympia

Thermopylae

Leaving Yánnina

Dodona: Asked of the Oracle

II - The Mirror of the Gorgon

Medusa

Perseus

Hippocrene

Athena

The Nereids of Seriphos

Seriphos Unvisited

Perseus Airborne

Atlas Immobilized

III - A Gathering of Shades

George Eliot Country

Medusa at Broadstairs

Highgate Cemetery

Margaret Fuller, 1847

Grasmere

Coleorton

Rydal Mount

The Odessa Steps

An Anatomy of Migraine

Alice

IV - Attachments, Links, Dependencies

London Inside and Outside

Babel Aboard the Hellas International Express

Saloniki

Venice Revisited

Man Feeding Pigeons

Progress at Building Site with (Fewer) Pigeons

Midsummer in the Blueberry Barrens

Tidewater Winter

Runes, Blurs, Sap Rising

Continental Drift

The Waterfall

A Hermit Thrush

Westward (1990)

I - Crossings

John Donne in California

Meadowlark Country

Notes on the State of Virginia

Kudzu Dormant

The Field Pansy

Dallas-Fort Worth: Redbud and Mistletoe

Deleted Passage

Seder Night

Mulciber at West Egg

At a Rest Stop in Ohio

Iola, Kansas

Antiphonal

A Note from Leyden

Having Lunch at Brasenose

Westward

II - Habitats

Grasses

Alders

Blueberrying in August

The Beach Pea

High Noon

A Whippoorwill in the Woods.

A Winter Burial

Portola Valley

A Minor Tremor

Savannah

Amherst

The Hurricane and Charlotte Mew

Dejection: A Footnote

Easedale Tarn

Fireweed

III - A Sort of Foothold

Vacant Lot with Pokeweed

The Subway Singer

My Cousin Muriel

A Hedge of Rubber Trees

The Halloween Parade

Nothing Stays Put

IV - The Prairie

A Silence Opens (1994)

I

Syrinx

Discovery

Hispaniola

Paumanok

Matoaka

Brought from Beyond

The Underworld of Dante

II

Shorebird-Watching

White

Green

Thinking Red

Nondescript

The Horned Rampion

Bayou Afternoon

III

In Umbria: A Snapshot

Birdham

At Easterly

Handed Down

Manhattan

The War Memorial

'Eighty-Nine

IV

At Muker, Upper Swaledale

Homeland

Sed de Correr

A Cadenza

Seed

Matrix

A Silence

Notes

Permissions

About the Author

Other Books by the Author.

Notes:

New York Times Notable Books of the Year (won), 1997

Bingham Poetry Prize (Boston, Massachusetts) (nominated), 1998

Preliminaries omitted.

ISBN:

0-307-77854-1

OCLC:

843005760