The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons: Volume 2 1978-2005

by A. R. Ammons, Robert M. West (Editor), Helen Vendler (Introduction)

Overview

An essential volume from “a master maker” (Richard Howard).

“If you will sit with me in the light // of speech, I will sit with you. . . .” Readers who accept that invitation will find themselves in extraordinary company. The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons, Volume II presents the second half of Archie Randolph Ammons’s long career, including the complete texts of his two book-length poems from that period: Garbage, for which he won his second National Book Award, and Glare, which drew special praise from the Academy of American Poets as it bestowed on him its highest honor, the Wallace Stevens Award. In addition, two appendices offer over one hundred and twenty previously uncollected poems dating from the 1950s to the late 1990s.

Among this volume’s many highlights are celebrations of the natural world (such as “Hermit Lark” and “Lofty Calling”), poems of remembrance (as in “Chinaberry” and “Keeping Track”), prayers (“Singling & Doubling Together” and “Autonomy”), and compelling meditations on loss and mortality (such as “Easter Morning” and “In View of the Fact”). As in Volume I, the variety of scale is remarkable, ranging from the massiveness of Glare to the haiku-like brevity of “Pebble’s Story.”

The text of each poem has been established after careful consideration of Ammons’s manuscripts and other prepublication materials. Endnotes detail the poems’ composition and publication histories, and also helpfully annotate references made within the poems. Celebrated poetry critic Helen Vendler’s introduction both humanizes Ammons and traces the growth of his outsized stature as a major poet, “unquestionably among the best-loved poets of our time” (David Lehman).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393254907
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	12/18/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	1088
File size:	950 KB

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.
Robert M. West is a professor of poetry and contemporary literature at Mississippi State University and lives in Starkville, Mississippi.

Editorial Reviews

★ 10/16/2017
Nearly a decade in the making, this immense two-volume retrospective painstakingly edited by West, associate professor of English at Mississippi State, “aims to offer authoritative texts” of every published poem by the prolific and illustrious Archie Randolph Ammons (1926–2001). In her introduction, Helen Vendler notes that Ammons “defined himself explicitly as an American poet writing of American places and American people.” His early poems were marked by scientific obsession, not surprising in the context of postwar America, but quite different from his late-’50s contemporaries, the beats and confessional poets. Ammons gradually turned towards matters of feeling and experience, but he remained ever attuned to the cycles and processes of nature. He was also a colloquial poet, which should not be confused with an anti-intellectual one. In the manner of William Carlos Williams, Ammons raised the American vernacular to the level of art. In Vendler’s estimation, Ammons’s work exhibits “constant humorous intimacy in everyday language.” The jovial or irreverent abuts the serious and earnest: “the weaving thermal gaze of/ the viper for the small mammal, mama/ mia.” Idiosyncratic punctuation, particularly an affinity for the colon, allows threads, however thin, to connect disparate ideas. Though Ammons produced many short poems, he was best known for his almost diaristic book-length poems such as The Snow Poems, Tape for the Turn of the Year, and Garbage: “garbage has to be the poem of our time because/ garbage is spiritual.” West rounds out this monumental body of work with 127 published but previously uncollected poems. Ammons “insouciantly filled up his page any way he liked,” writes Vendler, and West beautifully reproduces it all here. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly