Amy Clampitt Books

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 British authors. The Dorset poem was from her first collection, The Kingfisher. I had to special order the book, and by the time I picked it up the staff in the bookstore had also ordered their own personal copies. In this collection, Clampitt's subjects range from fog, beach glass, kingfishers and cormorants, dank mornings, to the residue of love affairs, and grief surrounding the death of John Lennon. She juxtaposes words as deftly as Dylan Thomas, and it is only her contemporary references that remind us that she is of our times. If you love to be suprised by words, see the world through the eyes of one truly capable of capturing it through the medium of poetry. Read Amy Clampitt, a delightful anachronism for lovers of the English language.

Amy , You go girl! you certainly know your stuff

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.