PARTISAN REVIEW
There is now not a single
leaf on the cheTTY tree:
except when the jay
plummets in, lights, and,
in pure clarity, squalls:
then every branch
quivers and
breaks out in blue leaves.
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The shock of hard, swift vision here is powerful and lovely.
It
recalls the sort of
naked language which William Carlos Williams made possible in American
poetry. There are many poems like this in the
Collected Poems.
One comes
upon them as upon wells of clear drink in a complicated landscape. The seam–
less intricacy of world and mind is not a subject matter of the poem, but a
medium into which the poet has been launched. In poems like these, the
scaffolding has been forgotten; the poet is naked in the world, and the world
has become naked to him. He is thinking with his "eyes"nothis mind,or rather,
his mind has let itself loose into the fusing brilliance of perception.
In another mode more special to his vision, Ammons has written poems
which are intricate mimetisms of change, expressing his sense of the unceasing
movement which is all we can know of experience, and of the world. Such
poems succeed when they grasp the form of movement in a kind of visual
onomatopoeia, instead of offering conclusions about a metaphysics of change.
Given Ammons's obsession with instability and process, it is no surprise that
he should have trouble with conclusions, both in the philosophical and in the
formal sense. It is only in mid-movement, like a sudden vision of all the drops
in a column of falling water, that his poetry attains a sort of cold ecstasy.
There is fascinating strength in a passage like this
From silence to silence:
as a woods stream
over a
rock holding on
breaks into clusters of sound
multiple and declaring as
leaves, each one,
filling
the continuum between leaves,
but a typical letdown in the poem 's concluding lines:
I stand up,
fracturing the equilibrium,
hold on,
