GEORGE BRADLEY
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a marvel of energy and effervescence, a flight of imagination not unac–
companied by flightiness, a poetry that combines a profound intelligence
and rigorous probity with an almost batty predilection for life's curiosi–
ties, for the eccentric detail.
In
the past, what gave her work its necessary
ballast was the weight of her wide vocabulary and her naturalist knowl–
edge. Amy Clampitt's poems are rarely academic, but they are always
learned. One "takes strange gain away" from her poems. The current
volume, for example, would be worth its considerable cost just for the
various types of soil it names: brunizem, chernozem, culm, rhizome,
stolon. As always, the reader is likely to encounter many new words in
Westward,
as well as an extraordinary number of plants. (Clampitt wishes
to do for flowers and trees what Marianne Moore did for animals.) This
book , though, carries the additional burden of a foreshadowed end, for
the poet has employed a great deal of art in keeping the reader aware of
an inevitable night that looms.
Westward
is at first glance a modest title, but the lone word gains
dimension as one reads through the cumulative poems.
It
recalls alter–
nately the colonizing lust of Ms. Clampitt's European ancestors and the
pioneer impulse of her immediate forebears.
It
stands as a metaphor for
the decline of empire and for the dwindling of our cultural tradition.
It
signifies a return, if only in memory, to the places of the poet's begin–
ning. And it implies a final, irresistible movement into old age and death.
Moreover, the trajectory implicit in the book's title is embodied by the
book's arrangement.
Westward
is a coherent whole in the way very few
collections of poetry manage to be. The individual poems in this book
are carefully placed to gain resonance by juxtaposition and to amplify the
conclusions of their predecessors. The trajectory of
Westward,
from dawn
to dusk, from childhood to old age, ends perforce in a return to earth,
taking the poet back
to
New Providence, if not to any providence di–
vine. Brunizem to brunizem, if you will. So it is that the last poem in
this book is a very fine and suitably expansive piece entitled "The
Prairie ."
It
contains an immense amount of information and allusion, as
well as some of the best writing this excellent poet has given us yet. Here
IS
a passage:
One comes to terms , in the long-drawn-out
shadow-war against the old ones: comes
to terms, if one lives long enough, with places
that go strange, that vanish into something else:
is ready to go back, at last, to gravesites, headstones,
the fenced grassland where so many forebears' bones
