[.ca] The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt (ISBN 0375700641)

From Amazon.com:
"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."

What the Light Was Like: Remembering Amy Clampitt's mind:
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.

Swoonworthy:
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.