{"product_id":"the-collected-poems-of-amy-clampitt-isbn-9780375700644","title":"The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt","description":"\u003cb\u003eNow, 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. \u003cb\u003e• With a foreword by Mary Jo Salter\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe 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. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen Amy Clampitt's first book of poems, \u003ci\u003eThe Kingfisher\u003c\/i\u003e, 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 \u003ci\u003eNew York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e said, \"With the publication of her brilliant first book, Clampitt immediately merits consideration as one of the most distinguished contemporary poets.\" \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe went on to publish four more collections in the next eleven years, the last one, \u003ci\u003eA Silence Opens,\u003c\/i\u003e appearing in the year she died.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAmy 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt 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.\"Amy Clampitt was born and brought up in New Providence, Iowa, graduated from Grinnell College, and from that time on lived mainly in New York City. Her first full-length collection, \u003cb\u003eThe Kingfisher,\u003c\/b\u003e published in 1983, was followed in 1985 by \u003cb\u003eWhat the Light Was Like,\u003c\/b\u003e in 1987 by \u003cb\u003eArchaic Figure,\u003c\/b\u003e and in 1990 by \u003cb\u003eWestward. A Silence Opens,\u003c\/b\u003e her last book, appeared in 1994.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe recipient in 1982 of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 1984 of an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, she was made a MacArthur Prize Fellow in 1992. She was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a Writer in Residence at the College of William and Mary, Visiting Writer at Amherst College, and Grace Hazard Conkling Visiting Writer at Smith College.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe died in September 1994.\u003cb\u003eTHE SUN UNDERFOOT AMONG THE SUNDEWS\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAn ingenuity too astonishing\u003cbr\u003eto be quite fortuitous is\u003cbr\u003ethis bog full of sundews, sphagnum-\u003cbr\u003elined and shaped like a teacup.\u003cbr\u003e                                               A step\u003cbr\u003edown and you're into it; a\u003cbr\u003ewilderness swallows you up:\u003cbr\u003eankle-, then knee-, then midriff-\u003cbr\u003eto-shoulder-deep in wetfooted\u003cbr\u003eunderstory, an overhead\u003cbr\u003espruce-tamarack horizon hinting\u003cbr\u003eyou'll never get out of here.\u003cbr\u003e                                       But the sun\u003cbr\u003eamong the sundews, down there,\u003cbr\u003eis so bright, an underfoot\u003cbr\u003ewebwork of carnivorous rubies,\u003cbr\u003ea star-swarm thick as the gnats\u003cbr\u003ethey're set to catch, delectable\u003cbr\u003edouble-faced cockleburs, each\u003cbr\u003ehair-tip a sticky mirror\u003cbr\u003eafire with sunlight, a million\u003cbr\u003eof them and again a million,\u003cbr\u003eeach mirror a trap set to\u003cbr\u003eunhand unbelieving,\u003cbr\u003e                               that either\u003cbr\u003ea First Cause said once, \"Let there\u003cbr\u003ebe sundews,\" and there were, or they've\u003cbr\u003emade their way here unaided\u003cbr\u003eother than by that backhand, round-\u003cbr\u003eabout refusal to assume responsibility\u003cbr\u003eknown as Natural Selection.\u003cbr\u003e                                            But the sun\u003cbr\u003eunderfoot is so dazzling\u003cbr\u003edown there among the sundews,\u003cbr\u003ethere is so much light\u003cbr\u003ein the cup that, looking,\u003cbr\u003eyou start to fall upward.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eA HERMIT THRUSH\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNothing's certain. Crossing, on this longest day,\u003cbr\u003ethe low-tide-uncovered isthmus, scrambling up\u003cbr\u003ethe scree-slope of what at high tide\u003cbr\u003ewill be again an island,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eto where, a decade since well-being staked\u003cbr\u003ethe slender, unpremeditated claim that brings us\u003cbr\u003eback, year after year, lugging the\u003cbr\u003emakings of another picnic--\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ethe cucumber sandwiches, the sea-air-sanctified\u003cbr\u003efig newtons--there's no knowing what the slamming\u003cbr\u003eseas, the gales of yet another winter\u003cbr\u003emay have done. Still there,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ethe gust-beleaguered single spruce tree,\u003cbr\u003ethe ant-thronged, root-snelled moss, grass\u003cbr\u003eand clover tuffet underneath it,\u003cbr\u003eedges frazzled raw\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ebut, like our own prolonged attachment, holding.\u003cbr\u003eWhatever moral lesson might commend itself,\u003cbr\u003ethere's no use drawing one,\u003cbr\u003ethere's nothing here\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eto seize on as exemplifying any so-called virtue\u003cbr\u003e(holding on despite adversity, perhaps) or\u003cbr\u003eany no-more-than-human tendency--\u003cbr\u003estubborn adherence, say,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eto a wholly wrongheaded tenet. Though to\u003cbr\u003ehold on in any case means taking less and less\u003cbr\u003efor granted, some few things seem nearly\u003cbr\u003ecertain, as that the longest day\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ewill come again, will seem to hold its breath,\u003cbr\u003ethe months-long exhalation of diminishment\u003cbr\u003eagain begin. Last night you woke me\u003cbr\u003efor a look at Jupiter,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ethat vast cinder wheeled unblinking\u003cbr\u003ein a bath of galaxies. Watching, we traveled\u003cbr\u003etoward an apprehension all but impossible\u003cbr\u003eto be held onto--\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ethat no point is fixed, that there's no foothold\u003cbr\u003ebut roams untethered save by such snells,\u003cbr\u003esuch sailor's knots, such stays\u003cbr\u003eand guy wires as are\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003emainly of our own devising. From such an\u003cbr\u003eempyrean, aloof seraphic mentors urge us\u003cbr\u003eto look down on all attachment,\u003cbr\u003eon any bonding, as\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ein the end untenable. Base as it is, from\u003cbr\u003eyear to year the earth's sore surface\u003cbr\u003emends and rebinds itself, however\u003cbr\u003eand as best it can, with\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ethread of cinquefoil, tendril of the magenta\u003cbr\u003ebeach pea, trammel of bramble; with easings,\u003cbr\u003emulchings, fragrances, the gray-green\u003cbr\u003ebayberry's cool poultice--\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eand what can't finally be mended, the salt air\u003cbr\u003eproceeds to buff and rarefy: the lopped carnage\u003cbr\u003eof the seaward spruce clump weathers\u003cbr\u003elustrous, to wood-silver.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLittle is certain, other than the tide that\u003cbr\u003ecircumscribes us, that still sets its term\u003cbr\u003eto every picnic--today we stayed too long\u003cbr\u003eagain, and got our feet wet--\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eand all attachment may prove at best, perhaps,\u003cbr\u003ea broken, a much-mended thing. Watching\u003cbr\u003ethe longest day take cover under\u003cbr\u003ea monk's-cowl overcast,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ewith thunder, rain and wind, then waiting,\u003cbr\u003ewe drop everything to listen as a\u003cbr\u003ehermit thrush distills its fragmentary,\u003cbr\u003ehesitant, in the end\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eunbroken music. From what source (beyond us, or\u003cbr\u003ethe wells within?) such links perceived arrive--\u003cbr\u003ediminished sequences so uninsistingly\u003cbr\u003enot even human--there's\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ehardly a vocabulary left to wonder, uncertain\u003cbr\u003eas we are of so much in this existence, this\u003cbr\u003ebotched, cumbersome, much-mended,\u003cbr\u003enot unsatisfactory thing.","brand":"Knopf","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301658218725,"sku":"NP9780375700644","price":30.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375700644.jpg?v=1767738731","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-collected-poems-of-amy-clampitt-isbn-9780375700644","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}