The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt

by Amy Clampitt

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 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."

Genres: Poetry

496 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Amy Clampitt was brought up in New Providence, Iowa. She wrote poetry in high school, but then ceased and focused her energies on writing fiction instead. She graduated from Grinnell College, and from that time on lived mainly in New York City.

To support herself, she worked as a secretary at the Oxford University Press, a reference librarian at the Audubon Society, and a freelance editor. Not until the mid-1960s, when she was in her forties, did she return to writing poetry. Her first poem was published by The New Yorker in 1978. In 1983, at the age of sixty-three, she published her first full-length collection, The Kingfisher.

Clampitt was the recipient of a 1982 Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship (1992), and she was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Poets. She died of cancer in September 1994.

Reviews

[Nathan · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's easy to get too much of Amy Clampitt in your system. I have a feeling that poetry comes easily to her: she lives in a world teeming with imagery- she thinks in poetry, rather than thoughts. Her verses are haiku-like observations of the natural world, uninterested in the symbolic meaning of nature, content merely to see them as they are, or rather, to see them as oneself sees them without worrying about what they signify. Everything is fertile ground for a Clampitt poem, and that lends itself to a certain lushness, but also a certain tedium. I like her best in small doses.

Clampitt writes in a funny hybrid style of formlessness and verbal showing off. She has these long, lanky stanza-verses of simple, external observation, studded with a twenty-five dollar word that sends you to the dictionary. She likes language, I think, and the attraction is less semantic than aesthetic: she likes the way obscure and difficult words shock and perplex the reader. I enjoyed her verbal hide-and-seek for a while; it becomes annoyingly coy after some time. A little Clampitt goes a long way, I think, and I definitely did a lot of picking up and putting down with this book.

I think she's fine, though, because she teaches you two very important lessons: one is that the English language has a lot of caves and alleyways populated by funny and temperamental words that usually scatter at the first sign of ordinary poetry. Clampitt shows us that chasing after these runaway words can be a good bit of fun. The second thing she teaches you is that there is no excuse for poet's block: the material for poetry is what makes up the entire world-if you are a poet who inhabits this world, you will never run out of things about which to write.

Those two lessons are important ones, and they're what I took away from this book; whether Amy Clampitt meant that or not hardly matters.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Better than drugs.

[David Anthony Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

As in any "Collected Poetry," the totality of the poems in this collection is somewhat uneven. That said, Amy Clampitt's work still ranks with the very best in English poetry over the last century. Her language is lush, her vocabulary rich (though sometimes verging the arcane and obscure), her poet's eye that of a naturalist, a scientist, as well as an artist. She has been compared with Wallace Stevens, and there are echoes and influences here. The intellect joined with the body in a dance. The senses all given their due. I have savored these poems for over two years and will savor going back and rereading.

[Marissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amy Clampitt's choice of words is luminous to say the least.

[Kelly · Rating 2 out of 5]

But at this remove what I think of as
strange and wonderful, strolling the side streets of Manhattan
on an April afternoon, seeing hybrid pear trees in blossom,
a tossing, vertiginous colonnade of foam, up above—
is the white petalfall, the warm snowdrift
of the indigenous wild plum of my childhood.
Nothing stays put. The world is a wheel.
All that we know, that we're
made of, is motion.

[Ryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Clampitt wrote like a scientist with a poetic bent. Technically accomplished - make no mistake of that. Just not particularly memorable, and somewhat chilly to the touch, like TS Eliot at his worst.

[Katrinka · Rating 3 out of 5]

Clampitt's poetry is tightly packed; might not've been the best thing to try to tackle a nearly 500-page collection, but I prevailed. Hope it makes sense to say I respect Clampitt and her work, but don't find rapturous personal enjoyment in the latter.

[Ian · Rating 2 out of 5]

I realize a lot of people like this woman, but I just can't get behind some of the moves she makes, which sympathize too much with the world of scholasticism and naturalism. She writes one poem we read in class on a common theme, the changing seasons and its correlation to the decay of the human body. But she ends it with a claim that it sure must be hard for those poor leaves which have to slowly fall, and that just seems like a stretch to me.

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I prefer early or late clampitt. And got bogged down in the middle. And oh you can tell she loved her some Elizabeth Bishop.

[Timothy · Rating 5 out of 5]

she makes me have collected poems envy