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is to move nearer,
in imagination, to the nub,
the pulse, the ember of what she was -
no stranger, finally, to the mystery
of what we are.
169
"No stranger," she also implies,
"than
the mystery of what we are."
Clampitt will be remembered and prized for her language, her lush
Keatsian descriptions, her push of monosyllables against mouth-filling
Latinate polysyllables, of the common against the remote, the physical
against the abstract, the plain against the ornate. For example, in
another elegiac poem she notices the "inklings// of undoing" at the end
of summer:
... or as the seasonal downpour
distends to a cording of thongs and sinews,
a knout of wet one gives oneself up to,
soaked through, having made one's peace with
whatever the elements can do . Or almost.
For beyond that peace is the shape of
calamity nobody is ever
ready for: on a day at the end of summer,
a car going off the road, a mangling
incendiary gasp, and for four young athletes,
without harbinger all is over.
Like Stevens, Clampitt is a poet who sends one to the dictionary; in
her case, to check on the nature of specific plants and animals, or the
nuances within words partially obscured by time: "spleenwort,"
"sirenian," "tergiversation," "alizarin," "carmine," "baldachin,"
"jewelweed." One relishes her combinations, always delightful, sometimes
startling: "dead-end chicaneries," "fey connoisseur/ of the unlooked for,"
"the elfin bubble of the incorporeal," "the wizened resins of
remembering," "the braken's yellowing diminishments." Even as a
chronicler of loss, an aficionado of sorrows, Clampitt confers the richness
of blessings. Like Keats, she cannot view stubble fields, or any landscape
of deprivation, without enacting ritual verbal reparations. The very
processes of birth give premonitions of death (another aspect of the
book's valedictory tones) in "Green," where all is process: " . . . The
relinquishing/ / of doing things, of being occupied/ at all, comes hard:!
