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by: Amy Clampitt
Amazon.com's Price: $23.95 Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 811
EAN: 9780375700644
ISBN: 0375700641
Label: Knopf
Manufacturer: Knopf
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 496
Publication Date: April 20, 1999
Publisher: Knopf
Release Date: April 20, 1999
Sales Rank: 647863
Studio: Knopf
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Editorial Review:
Amazon.com:
'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.'
Product Description:
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
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating: - A Great and Idiosyncratic Poet
Amy Clampitt was an American original. Both her life and her poetry demand serious attention. Having all of her five volumes in one big, beautiful book means that a reader can take the measure of (and derive pleasure from) the woman who was America's oldest "young" poet, who did not publish her first book until she was 63. Now that her letters have also been published, we can get a sense of the woman behind the pen. Both the letters and, even more fully, the poems, attest to the deep humanity of ... Read More
Rating: - Swoonworthy
Amy Clampitt sure-handedly set the gold standard for poetry in the waning decades of the twentieth century. Her work is a universe of grace. I've got three copies of this one--one for the bedside table, one for sneaking reacquaintance in the lower-left drawer of my office desk, and another for the slow-crawling intervals of the commute. When it comes to poetry, there haven't exactly been too many essential collections of late. But this is one.
Rating: - What the Light Was Like: Remembering Amy Clampitt's mind
Now here in one gorgeous volume is 496 pages of proof that this original and curious intellect once lived among us, and, having looked (and looked) at our time and many places, left us these hard-headed, light-filled poems.
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