Sumerian Vistas

by A. R. Ammons

Overview

Ammons's poetic genius has always been at home in forms ranging from brief lyrics to longer works.

In the present volume—the first since his highly acclaimed Lake Effect Country—readers will find superb examples of work in both forms. "The Ridge Farm," which begins the book, and "Tombstones," at its center, are fine longer meditations, while "Motion's Holdings," the concluding section, contains a number of his best new shorter poems. The book is proof, once again, that Ammons is one of our major American poets.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393304251
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	06/17/1987
Edition description:	1st ed
Pages:	140
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(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

Following the recently published The Selected Poems: expanded edition (Norton, 1987), Ammons's new work reaffirms his prolificacy (20 books in 32 years) and a tendency to rework familiar themes. The title recalls the poem ``Sumerian,'' whose speaker aspires to a ``high platform.'' Here that high point is ``The Ridge Farm.'' Symbolic of opposing forcesrecalcitrance and fluency, rock and wind, holding and motionit is a place only the poet, not the owner, can appreciate. Too often Ammons's ``inescapable intellect'' places natural objects under a microscrope, as when heavy snowflakes become ``motions the mind mulls over/ and subdues to/ intelligible reticula. . . .'' Since Ammons's best verses capture the immediacy of humans in nature, not removed from it, the shorter poems are often his most appealing. Lisa Mullenneaux, Iowa City, Ia.

Library Journal