A Book of Poems

Corson's Inlet is A. R. Ammons's third book of poems. Consisting of some of his best early work, including such strikingly inventive poems as "Jungle Knot," "Coon Song," "Four Motions for the Pea Vines," and the title piece, this volume provides incontestable evidence of Ammons's rapid early growth as a poet, of his ever-broadening range and deepening perception. Corsons Inlet, like Ammons's Tape for the Turn of the Year, shows clearly his remarkable originality—and, more important, his lavish and unique poetic gifts.

A.R. Ammons produced some of the twentieth century’s most innovative and enduring poetry, collected here for the first time in its entirety. Volume I follows Ammons’s development through his National Book Award-winning Collected Poems 1951–1971 and his daring work of the 1970s. The second volume rounds out Ammons’s rich middle phase and startling later work, including the posthumously published Bosh and Flapdoodle. The Complete Poems of A.R. Ammons offers authoritative texts of every published poem and includes over one hundred previously uncollected poems by “unquestionably among the best-loved poets of our time” (David Lehman).

This reissue of A. R. Ammons's debut, published five decades ago in a rare edition, with its penetrating "Whitmanian chants . . . holds in it the mystery of his gradual development into a major American poet, who will be read by the most discerning until the last syllable of recorded time" (Harold Bloom).

A.R. Ammons produced some of the twentieth century’s most innovative and enduring poetry, collected here for the first time in its entirety. Volume I follows Ammons’s development through his National Book Award-winning Collected Poems 1951–1971 and his daring work of the 1970s. The second volume rounds out Ammons’s rich middle phase and startling later work, including the posthumously published Bosh and Flapdoodle. The Complete Poems of A.R. Ammons offers authoritative texts of every published poem and includes over one hundred previously uncollected poems by “unquestionably among the best-loved poets of our time” (David Lehman).

Sphere is the second of A. R. Ammons's long poems—following Tape for the Turn of the Year and preceding Garbage—that mark him as a master of this particular form. The sphere in question is the earth itself, and Ammons's wonderfully stocked mind roams globally, ruminating on subjects that range from galaxies to gas stations. It is a remarkable achievement, comparable in importance to Wallace Stevens's Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.

"There wasn't one page of his poem that didn't delight me." —Donald Davie, New York Review of Books

The critic Harold Bloom writes, "With the publication of his Selected Poems (1968), soon after turning forty, A. R. Ammons quietly demonstrated a unique and central position in recent American poetry. . . . Recognition, as is always the case with a poetry difficult and central, has come slowly, but critics now begin to see in Ammons what he is: the maker of a body of poetry that fulfills Emerson's prophecy by addressing itself to life 'with sufficient plainness and with sufficient profoundness.'"

Ommateum, his first book, was published in 1955, and was followed in 1964 by Expressions of Sea Level.Corsons Inlet and Tape for the Turn of the Year were published in 1965 by Cornell University Press. In 1966, Mr. Ammons received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for creative writing in poetry.

"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.

In the poetry of A. R. Ammons, Helen Vendler has written, "the scientific world is beautifully in balance with the perceptual one." Originally published in 1982, this collection reminds us why Ammons must be read by all those who would understand our age and one of its most brilliant voices.

"It will seem increasingly to many attentive readers that this volume the most distinguished book of American verse, in my judgment, since the publication of Wallace Stevens's Collected Poems in 1955 marks the permanent establishment of a major visionary poet." Harold Bloom "No mere gathering of poems, this collection is like one an explorer brings back." David Kalstone"

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

With characteristic economy, A. R. Ammons writes that "Brink Road lies off NY 96 between Candor and Catatonk." The very name suggests that we are ever in transition from one state of mind to another always on the edge of revelation.

The more than 150 poems in Brink Road date from 1973 to the present, dealing with Ammons's concerns with language, mortality, and the forces underlying the natural world. With elegance, wit, and ruminative gravity, Brink Road is an important addition to one of the most enduring bodies of poetry of our time.

A. R. Ammons was Goldwin Smith Professor of Poetry at Cornell University. He died in 2001. Among Ammons's numerous awards are two National Book awards in 1993 for Garbage and in 1973 for Collected Poems 1951-1971.

In the form of a journal covering the period December 6, 1963, through January 10, 1964, A. R. Ammons's long, thin poem was written on a roll of adding-machine tape, then transferred foot by foot to manuscript. He chose this method as a serious experiment in making a poem adapt to something outside itself. The tape determined both the length of the poems's lines and when it ends. Tape for the Turn of the Year is a poem of infinite variety, blessed by the rich resources of one of this century's greatest poets. By turns witty, serious, lyrical, and meditative, it is at once a superbly entertaining book and a significant literary achievement.

"This, the most surprising formal invention of a major innovator, is the fullest vision Ammons gives of his enormous creative enterprise. Among the major descendents of Whitman's Song of Myself, Tape occupies an essential imaginative space, showing us much about what is essential in the American poetic imagination."—Harold Bloom

"Epigram, haiku, koan, imagist snapshot, proverb, aphorism, motto: Ammons's compressed, honed, precise lyrics now suggest one, now another of these genres. The mastery here is complete and all the more remarkable in light of Ammons's achievements in really long, sometimes book-length, poems. Throughout his long and distinguished career, Ammons has shown repeatedly and successfully that his work aims to embody the complementary principles of expansion and contraction. This pithy, witty book testifies to the sublime possibilities of the latter."—Virginia Quarterly Review

"Filled with sharp irony and passionate insight, the more than 100 poems in the collection span the career of one of the deans of contemporary poetry. . . . Ammons makes you laugh and forces you to think hard about the way humans relate to natural phenomena and to themselves. From such simple, short expression emerge complex, often confounding ideas. New readers of poetry as well as those with an active interest in lyric verse will love this volume."—Booklist

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."

Presenting the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for 1981 to Ammons's A Coast of Trees Richard Locke, editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, said, in part: "In the thirty years since A. R. Ammons published his first poems, he has fashioned a body of work that achieves a rare amplitude, specific gravity, and high seriousness. He is a poet of the American Sublime a nature poet, as we say standing in the tradition of Wordsworth, Emerson, and Whitman. Amidst the hue and cry of contemporary poetical factions, his work pursues its own integrity: clear, unblinking in its self-knowledge, remarkable for its radiant density of argument and feeling."

The distinguished poet A. R. Ammons once described himself as, "not so much looking for the shape as being available to any shape that may be summoning itself through me from the self not mine but ours." This "availability" has enabled his poetic genius to be at home in forms raging from brief lyrics-the best of which he brought together in The Selected Poems: 1951-1977-all the way to poems of full book length.

Critics and readers alike recognize Ammons's achievements: in 1973, his Collected Poems won the National Book Award for Poetry; in 1975, his long poem Sphere: The Form of a Motion was nominated for the National Book Award and received the Bollingen Prize for Poetry: in 1977, he received and award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. The Snow Poems, Ammons's twelfth book, is a major achievement by a major American Poet.

The poems are on a diversity of subjects, but through them all runs the strong unity of vision that has led critic Geoffrey Hartman to acclaim Ammons as "a major American poet" (New York Times Book Review). "If his importance was suspected before," wrote the poet John Ashbery in The New York Review of Books, "it is now confirmed." Ammons came late to poetry, and has come even more lately into national recognition. That recognition is solid, however, and can only be increased by this, his latest volume.

Bloom continues, "There are other American poets since Stevens who have composed a handful of memorable poems, but only Ammons has begun to show us a whole poetic world. More than his contemporaries, he has perfected a voice that, to cite Emerson, is 'ready to render an image of every created thing.'" David Kalstone says, "The poems are, by and large, tough or wry meditations, striking out into strange landscapes, dreams or nightmares, which are seen with entire clarity, no blurring, as if this were the only way the mind could be unwound on the page. The book forms a journal of mental states, each poem finding a form and a scene for a very exact mental encounter of discovery. . . . 'Small and Easy' is the way everything is finally made to seem, like the rarest dancing, in which briefly and freshly the dancer shows us what space is like by showing how much he can possess."

A superb long poem by the contemporary master of the form, "Glare" consists of two sections: "Strip" and "Scat Scan". The poem demonstrates, yet again, why A.R. Ammons's poetic voice is a national treasure: by turns cosmic, self-inflating, self "de"flating, eloquent, intimate, bawdy, comic, precise--and always unmistakably his own.

As the citation for the 1993 National Book Award for Poetry said, "Garbage is an epic of ideas: all life--not that of human beings alone, but of every species--is shown to be part of an ultimate reality. . . . For power of the thought and language, the poem takes its place alongside Whitman's 'Song of Myself'--an American classic".

This collection of poems deals with the author's lifelong concerns with language, mortality and the natural world.