Selected Poems of Amy Clampitt

Amy Clampitt

2011 ots. · Saltzailea: Knopf

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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.

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Amy Clampitt was the author of five collections of poems: The Kingfisher, What the Light Was Like, Archaic Figure, Westward, and A Silence Opens. She lived in New York City until her death in 1994.

Mary Jo Salter is the author of six collections of poetry, including A Phone Call to the Future: New and Selected Poems. She is a professor in the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and divides her time between Baltimore, Maryland, and Amherst, Massachusetts.