144
PARTISAN REVIEW
Renato Rosaldo, an anthropologist whom I greatly respect,
writes enthusiastically on the back cover, but I find myself unable to
join in the applause.
EDMUND LEACH
THE LUXURIES OF DETAIL
WHAT THE LIGHT WAS LIKE. By Amy Clampitt.
Alfred A. Knopf.
$14.95.
BLESSING. By Christopher Jane Corkery.
Princeton University Press.
$13.95.
There is no point in introducing Amy Clampitt here. Her
rapid ascendency and success, after years of neglect, have passed into
literary folklore, and her first book,
The Kingfisher,
has the status of a
modern masterpiece.
It
is axiomatic, of course, that the follow-up
work will be received less enthusiastically- sudden acclaim invar–
iably puts the writer in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't
situation. To continue in the original vein is to be resting on laurels;
to depart is to betray the gift . Clampitt, in
What the Light Was Like,
plays shrewdly down the middle, neither quite repeating nor betray–
ing.
If
the result is not as striking as
The Kingfisher,
it's less because
her performance has fallen off, more because her idiom has revealed
its intrinsic limitations.
With
The Kingfisher,
Clampitt injected a much-needed serum of
the baroque into the bloodstream of English-language poetry. In–
deed, so starved were readers for her kind of verbal richness and
stylization - who can explain what a public craves at any given
time? - that sins of excess were either overlooked or forgiven. And
there were excesses, grand cadenzas of ornamental description that
almost completely buried the object or event in question. Aware of
her tendency, Clampitt cleverly looked for subjects that would let
profusion appear appropriate. In "Botanical Nomenclature," for in–
stance, she wrote of:
foliage
blued to a driftwood patina
growing outward, sometimes to the
