"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."

From Library Journal
"I find it tempting to imagine what/...the light was like," muses Clampitt in one of her finest poems, and now that her light has been tragically snuffed, we can at least be grateful to have her five books of poetry?The Kingfisher (1983), What the Light Was Like (1985), Archaic Figure (1987), Westward (1990), and A Silence Opens (1994). Collected here for the first time three years after Clampitt's death, these works represent some of the best poetry written in late- 20th-century America. A personal and affecting introduction by poet Mary Jo Salter rounds out the volume. Any library lacking Clampitt's luminous work owes it to its patrons to buy this book.?Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The Economist
...a rare and enduring achievement ... Clampitt is, among other things, a poet to learn from.

The Wall Street Journal, Merle Rubin
... allusive, intricately wrought work... A late-starter in the tradition of Whitman and Stevens, Ms. Clampitt was a published poet for only the last 11 years of her life. But her output is as remarkable for its range as for its excellence.... Ms. Clampitt's brilliant variety, her graceful wit, are abundantly evident in this rich harvest of her works.

The New York Times Book Review, Christopher Benfey
With the passage of time, the wonder of Clampitt's late appearance in print and the poignancy of her quick departure from it will both recede, allowing readers to come to terms with the kind of poet she was, and is.

Book 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

From the Inside Flap
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

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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. 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 languagean appealing mix of formal and everyday expression - that poured out with such passion and was shaped in rhythms and patterns entirely her own.

FROM THE CRITICS

Christopher Benfey - New York Times Book Review

...[An] extraordinary life's work.

Christopher Benfey - The New York Times Book Review