Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

The poetry of A.R. Ammons is highly regarded by many representatives of the North American literary establishment. Harold Bloom is quoted on the cover of the Collected claiming him as a major visionary poet and John Hollander refers to the publication of the same book as a major imaginative event. Ammons has twice received a National Book Award and, among other honours, a Bollingen prize and the Robert Frost medal from the Poetry Society of America. Both of these books are paperback reprints - Collected Poems 1951-1971 was originally published in 1972, and Worldly Hopes in 1982 - and together they provide a useful opportunity to judge whether or not those transatlantic plaudits are justified.

     The earlier poems in the Collected are mainly celebrations of the natural world and despite the typographical ‘modernity’ of the verse-patterning there is something psalmodic in their rhythms. More than once I was reminded of the cadences of Dylan Thomas as - if you don’t let your ear be distracted by the line-breaks - in these lines from ‘Requiem’:

and the surf, again unheard,
eased to primal rhythms
of jellyfishing heart, breaking into mind;
ants came out and withered in the sun;
the white shark
sucked at the edge of the sea on the silent,
                                                scarlet morning

The quasi-biblical sonorities soon give way to more angular rhythms and the language veers, not always happily, towards abstraction. Then, in the middle and later poems, Ammons extends his range to include irony and poems of a more personal kind, often wittily self-deprecatory, and finally the impressive, large-scale philosophical works which include ‘Essay on Poetics’ and ‘Hibernaculum’.

     Collected Poems 1951-1971 probably deserves the honours that have come its way but I find it hard to whip up much enthusiasm for the minimalism of Worldly Hopes though, at their best, these mainly miniscule aperçus can be both thoughtful and touching. Still, I’d need a lot of convincing that pieces like ‘Progress Report’ are worth printing. Here it is, all of it:

Now I’m
into things
so small
when I
say boo
I disappear.