In 1983, at the age of sixty-three, Amy Clampitt published her first full-length collection, The Kingfisher (Alfred A. Knopf). In the decade that followed, Clampitt published five books of poetry, including What the Light Was Like (Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), Archaic Figure (Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), and Westward (Alfred A. Knopf, 1990). Her last book, A Silence Opens (Alfred A. Knopf), appeared in 1994. The recipient in 1982 of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 1984 of an Academy Fellowship, she was made a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 1992.
Book Reviews
Autumn 1989
Purloined Sincerity
Writing the Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature edited by Elizabeth C. Goldsmith. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989. 296 pages. $32.50. The writing of letters—real old-fashioned ones, as distinguished from […]
Poetry
Spring 1983
Keats and the Elgin Marbles
for Frederick Turner Openings. Winandermere* and Derwentwater. The Elgin Marbles. That last evening at the Crown in Liverpool, with George and his new wife, imagination failed —and still fails: what […]
Contemporary American Poetry
Summer 1982
The Reedbeds of the Hackensack
Scummed maunderings that nothing loves but reeds, Phragmites, neighbors of the greeny asphodel that thrive among the windings of the Hackensack, collaborating to subvert the altogether ugly if too down-to-earth […]
Contemporary American Poetry
Summer 1982
Olympia
The marble stumps, the plundered archeology of games— the foot race, the hippodrome, the chariot on the racetrack; the fox-and-geese-track in the schoolyard snow; the footprints of the weasel and […]
Contemporary American Poetry
Summer 1982
Imago
The fulcrum of America is the plains, half sea half land. Charles Olson There is no Middle West. It is a certain climate, a certain landscape, and beyond that, a […]
Contemporary American Poetry
Summer 1982
Rain at Bellagio
1 The omnipresence of the sound of water: rain on the graveled walks, the lakeside terraces, the red pantiles of Bellagio. At Paestum we had not heard it. An acreage […]
Poetry
Winter 1982
Triptych
Palm Sunday Neither the wild tulip, poignantand sanguinary, nor the dandelionblowsily unbuttoning, answersthe gardener's imperative, if need be,to maim and hamper in the name of order,or the taste for rendering […]
Poetry
Winter 1981
Marginal Employment
The Duc de Berry usually wore a robe the color of the Mediterranean, and listed two pots of salts of cobalt along with apes and dromedaries, a tooth of Charlemagne, […]
Poetry
Summer 1980
Or Consider Prometheus
In 1859 petroleum was discovered in Pennsylvania. Kerosene, petroleum and paraffin began rapidly to replace whale oil, sperm oil and spermaceti wax … . Consider whaling as FRONTIER, and INDUSTRY. […]
Keats and the Elgin Marbles
From The Kenyon Review, New Series, Spring 1983, Vol. V. No. 2 for Frederick Turner Openings. Winandermere* and Derwentwater. The Elgin Marbles. That last evening at the Crown in Liverpool, […]