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 SalterAmazon.com 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." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

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 a wonderful writer.

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.

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. ... Read more

Product Description
When Amy Clampitt’s first collection, The Kingfisher, was published, it was hailed as that rare first book that “signals a major poet in full bloom” (Los Angeles Times). Its author was sixty-three years old. Over the next eleven years, Clampitt produced four additional, major collections. Now, the most essential poems from these five volumes are gathered together.

Clampitt was an impassioned observer of the natural world, the delights of which color many of these poems: writing of the fog, she described “a stuff so single / it might almost be lifted, / folded over, crawled underneath / or slid between, as nakedness- / caressingsheets.” Such was the texture of her language, too. She was a traveler, reporting back from England and Greece, from California and Maine, and from her native Midwest. An Iowa transplant to New York, the descendant of pioneers, she wrote of prairies and subways; of the movements of wildflowers, people, and ideas; and of the widespread modern experience of uprootedness.

Here is a treasure of Amy Clampitt’s verse, for those who are reading her for the first time, as well as for those who have long admired her. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Awful poems!
I don't mind poetry that's difficult on the surface; I don't mind having to use a dictionary to come to terms with it; and I don't mind contempory poetry written in traditional forms as long as it's well done. But the effort to read it better be worth my time.

This isn't a poetry collection. It's a field guide and botany textbook set to meter. It's ironic that this book praises nature because it angers me that trees were cut down to print it. What a shameful waste of wood pulp!

I've finished almost all poetry collections I started even when the poems were bad. It's rare for me to give up on a book and sell it to Half Price Books (which is what I did in this case). If I had done that with Allen Ginsburgs "Fall of America" collection I wouldn't have gotten to his "Bixby Canyon Ocean Path Word Breeze" poem that made all the bad poems worth wading through.

But I just couldn't take Clampet's "What the Light Was Like." I gave up on it about one third of the way through. These poems are just plain ugly and a torture to read.

Stay away! You've been warned.

Amy, damn girl!
Amy , You go girl! you certainly know your stuff ... Read more

Product Description
A final collection of poems considers the splendors and nightmares of the world and focuses and such topics as Maine fog, a bayou afternoon, and the waning old Greenwich Village crowd. Reprint. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Truly gifted poetry.A rare treat.
The first time I was introduced to Amy Clampitt was with the poem Dorset, reproduced in a waiting room magazine.I was struck by the contrast between her southern-sounding name and the richness of her vocabulary,which in my opinion, equals anything by the best 19th century Britishauthors.The Dorset poem was from her first collection, The Kingfisher.Ihad to special order the book, and by the time I picked it up the staff inthe bookstore had also ordered their own personal copies.In thiscollection, Clampitt's subjects range from fog, beach glass, kingfishersand cormorants, dank mornings, to the residue of love affairs, and griefsurrounding the death of John Lennon.She juxtaposes words as deftly asDylan Thomas, and it is only her contemporary references that remind usthat she is of our times.If you love to be suprised by words, see theworld through the eyes of one truly capable of capturing it through themedium of poetry.Read Amy Clampitt, a delightful anachronism for loversof the English language. ... Read more

Product Description

This extraordinary collection of letters sheds light on one of the most important postwar American poets and on a creative woman's life from the 1950s onward. Amy Clampitt was an American original, a literary woman from a Quaker family in rural Iowa who came to New York after college and lived in Manhattan for almost forty years before she found success (or before it found her) at the age of 63 with the publication ofThe Kingfisher. Her letters from 1950 until her death in 1994 are a testimony to her fiercely independent spirit and her quest for various kinds of truth-religious, spiritual, political, and artistic.

Written in clear, limpid prose, Clampitt's letters illuminate the habits of imagination she would later use to such effect in her poetry. She offers, with wit and intelligence, an intimate and personal portrait of life as an independent woman recently arrived in New York City. She recounts her struggle to find a place for herself in the world of literature as well as the excitement of living in Manhattan. In other letters she describes a religious conversion (and then a gradual religious disillusionment) and her work as a political activist. Clampitt also reveals her passionate interest in and fascination with the world around her. She conveys her delight in a variety of day-to-day experiences and sights, reporting on trips to Europe, the books she has read, and her walks in nature.

After struggling as a novelist, Clampitt turned to poetry in her fifties and was eventually published in theNew Yorker. In the last decade of her life she appeared like a meteor on the national literary scene, lionized and honored. In letters to Helen Vendler, Mary Jo Salter, and others, she discusses her poetry as well as her surprise at her newfound success and the long overdue satisfaction she obviously felt, along with gratitude, for her recognition.

Customer Reviews (3)

Lack of commetaries
I bought this book and am enjoying it; each letter is a treasure from the inner feelings of an enchanted creature.But I have a remark to do to the Editor, about lack of commentaries and footnotes on the letters.It would be far better for the reader to know at least few notes either of the letters' recipients, the mentioned persons and the related main events.A chronology of the poet's life yet would be welcome to the book.There are some few references to related persons on the book's introduction that I think are insufficient.

The Delight of a New Friend
Aside from the pleasure this excellent collection of her letters will bring to fans of Amy Clampitt's poetry, real delight is in store for any reader who loves books and taking life seriously but not grimly. Amy Clampitt came late to being recognized as a poet but she always had the integrity of an artist. Unusually modest, unusually interested in the world outside her self, her correspondence tells the classic American story of a bright young woman from the Midwest who moves to New York City. But instead of finding misery and disillusionment, Amy Clampitt found a rich life of the mind, new discoveries to make about the city and its inhabitants, and, at last, the genre she wrote best in and loved--poetry. She was given to finding happiness in her relationships and her work, and when acclaim and the acquaintance of the literary world came to her at the age of 63, she was both too old and too sensible to be anything but observant, grateful, and thrilled. She had lived in New York for years with the strategy that "underdressing" kept one comfortable. As a poet, as a woman, she was anything but underdressed--she was glorious--but in a world of peacocks, her lack of narcissism shines. At the end of the book, you feel as if you've lost a friend. The introduction by editor Willard Spiegelman is informative and graceful, and the selection of letters just right.

A Woman's Literary Life
Even people with no interest in poetry will be touched by the letters of Amy Clampitt, who lived in New York for forty years before she became an instant celebrity at 63 when Knopf published her first book of poems. Late bloomers: take heart. Clampitt was there before you. She worked as a literary editor and a librarian, and led a quiet, humble, thoughtful life. Her letters are marvels of energy and observation. As a Quaker, she participated in political activism in the 60s, and had a strong sense of social obligation. In addition, she wrote (both prose and poetry) like an angel. ... Read more

Product Description
Exploring the connections between nature and culture, this volume discusses the works of three female American poets: Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672), Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), and Amy Clampitt (1920-1994).

Though only Bradstreet was born outside North America, each poet is shown to grapple with the ways that European civilization was transformed on the new continent. The author's analysis highlights the interconnected themes of travel, geography, cartography and wildness. ... Read more

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Reflecting on her poetic predecessors and contemporaries, Amy Clampitt reveals the many connections in their craft
... Read more

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Distinguished poet Amy Clampitt selects some of the finest works by one of England's most passionate authors, John Donne, in a collection that includes "The Bait," "To His Mistress Going to Bed," "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," "Hymn to God my God, in my Sickness," and many others. Reprint. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from New Criterion, published by Thomson Gale on January 1, 2006. The length of the article is 910 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: A garrulous creature.(Love, Amy: The Selected Letters of Amy Clampitt)(Book review)
Author: Anthony Cuda
Publication: New Criterion (Magazine/Journal)
Date: January 1, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 24Issue: 5Page: 75(2)

Article Type: Book review

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Product Description
This digital document, covering the life and work of Amy Clampitt, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thompson Gale. The length of the entry is 1523 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
• Family members
• Education
• Professional associations and honors
• Employment
• Writings, including books and periodicals
• A description of the author's work
• References to further readings about the author

Product Description
This digital document is an article from Poetry, published by Modern Poetry Association on July 1, 1998. The length of the article is 999 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt.
Author: John (English pop musician) Taylor
Publication: Poetry (Refereed)
Date: July 1, 1998
Publisher: Modern Poetry Association
Volume: v172Issue: n4Page: p225(3)

Article Type: Book Review

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