Bosh and Flapdoodle

by A. R. Ammons

Overview

"No other contemporary poet, in America, is likelier to become a classic than A. R. Ammons."—Harold Bloom

Bosh and Flapdoodle is A. R. Ammons's last completed collection of poetry. Written over a six-week period, the book offers a series of candid, alternately hilarious and heartbreaking ruminations on age, illness, and death, while still finding room for the poet's always penetrating observations of daily life and natural events.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393328950
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	09/17/2006
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

A. R. Ammons’s (1926–2001) was a two-time winner of the National Book Award and the recipient of a National Book Critics Circle Award. His many additional honors include the Academy of American Poets’ Wallace Stevens Award, the Bollingen Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Robert Frost Medal, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations.

Editorial Reviews

[A] vernacular American Ovid, an irreverent master of metamorphosis.

Edward Hirsch - New York Times Book Review

His poems, framed in ordinary language and couched in stately couplets, are twisty and testy, bawdy and funny.

Time

By the time of his death in 2001, Ammons had won almost every award a poet can win. A National Book Award, a Pulitzer and a MacArthur "genius" grant (among others) honored his folksy yet intellectually rewarding verse, from sprawling, apparently improvised, philosophically rich book-length poems (Garbage; Sphere) to compact collections of witty and elegant lyric (A Coast of Trees; The Really Short Poems of A.R. Ammons). Begun in 1996 and clearly intended as a unified book, this posthumous gathering splits the difference between Ammons's short and long modes, and retains the virtues of both. Individual poems (each two pages in length) in unrhymed couplets address individual topics (bodily functions; "tree-limbs down" in a storm; A.E. Housman; "leaves from/ the maple by the driveway"; money; a "bathroom window open an inch") then add up to a sadder-but-wiser, resigned-yet-cheerful sequence about old age. Raised in North Carolina, Ammons taught for decades at Cornell in upstate New York: both the Southern twang of his origins and the snowdrifts of his adopted home inform these affecting if sometimes meandering ruminations. As usual, Ammons keeps comic effects close at hand: one poem begins by confusing songs from Wales with whales' songs. And, as usual, Ammons's offhanded manner permits surprising meditations on the nature of art, emotion, the world and the self. (Mar.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

"When the love dies out/ at last on the darkening coals, the life/ turns to jewels" Ammons's last poems, written over a six-week period in 1996 and shortly before his death in 2001, are certainly jewels, which sparkle from beyond the grave. The words bosh and flapdoodle mean nonsense-but these poems are anything but foolish talk from a poet who earned his place in the canon of 20th-century poetry. Full of Ammons's bawdy speak and ribald humor, the unpolished poems (complete with quirks and misspellings) continue his legacy with his signature couplets, colons, and ellipses. He writes of bodily functions (and malfunctions); about sex, illness, and prescription drugs; and things he sees outside his window-all with an eerie insight. His last poems are wistful, sad, and unfailingly (failingly?) human. Yet, there is no self-pity here, no self-flagellation for things done or not done. He says, "Poets 'say things': they shape stuff up and/ make it 'sound like something.'" Indeed. Ammons makes something out of the seeming randomness of the world. Highly recommended.-Karla Huston, Appleton Art Ctr., WI Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

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