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A. R. Ammons: Selected Poems

Edited by David Lehman

“Ammons (1926–2001) was a difficult figure to pin down. While unassociated with any particular poetic school or group, he picked up threads from Whitman, Williams, Frost and Stevens, weaving them into poetry all his own: equal parts pastoral meditation, philosophical speculation and homespun resignation. In the process, he won nearly every honor a major American poet can. Now, in the first selection to present samplings from the whole of his oeuvre (which ranges from two-line lyrics to book-length sequences), we can survey the extent is his poetic powers.”—Publishers Weekly

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

Meditative, comic, emotionally wrenching, steeped in both the natural world and the life of the mind, the poetry of A. R. Ammons is at once cosmic in scope and intimate in its moment-to-moment transformations. With his mastery of description and cadence, his roiling wit and fearless gaze, Ammons was a philosopher of the everyday who found surprise everywhere he looked. “He is often witty, sometimes bawdy,” writes editor David Lehman, “on a perpetual quest to find forms capacious enough for an imagination intent on finding a place for everything.”

A compound, in editor David Lehman’s words, of “wisdom, pathos, humor, mortal longing, and intimations of immortality,” the work of A. R. Ammons is like nothing else in modern American poetry. Ammons’s tireless formal invention and restless curiosity about every aspect of nature and of the mind are embodied in poetry that is effortlessly accessible and generous in its impulses. Whether spreading out in the long forms of Tape for the Turn of the Year or Garbage, or honing his perceptions down to the extreme brevity of his shorter lyrics, he holds tight to his vision of the way “all day / life itself is bending, / weaving, changing, / adapting, failing, / succeeding.”

This new selection covering the whole range of Ammons’s career offers a superb introduction to the pleasures and surprises of his work. His uncanny ability to balance wide-ranging abstract speculation with meticulous observation of natural phenomena, in poetry that encompasses moods of tragic pathos, low comedy, and seemingly casual profundity marks him as one of the preeminent figures in our recent literature.

David Lehman has been the series editor of The Best American Poetry since its creation in 1988. His books of poetry include New and Selected Poems, When a Woman Loves a Man, and The Daily Mirror. He teaches in the New School graduate writing program in New York City.
Table of Contents

Introduction by David Lehman

So I Said I Am Ezra
A Crippled Angel
Whose Timeless Reach
Hymn
Come Prima
Mountain Liar
Gravelly Run
Close-Up
Mansion
Guide
Uh, Philosophy
Epiphany
Still
Corsons Inlet
Moment
Reflective
Communication
Mountain Talk
He Held Radical Light
Poetics
from Tape for the Turn of the Year
Dominion
Cascadilla Falls
Reversal
Positions
Correction
Mirrorment
The Put-Down Come On
Play
Working Still
The Unifying Principle
Triphammer Bridge
The City Limits
For Harold Bloom
from Sphere: The Form of a Motion
Ballad
One Must Recall as One Mourns the End
The Perfect Journey Is
You Can’t Imitate
Some Nights I Go Out to Piss
In Memoriam Mae Noblitt
Easter Morning
Sunday at McDonald’s
Poverty
Immoderation
The Role of Society in the Artist
Shit List; or, Omnium-gatherum of Diversity into Unity
Immortality
The Fairly High Assimilation Rag
I Could Not Be Here At All
Autonomy
Their Sex Life
For Louise and Tom Gossett
from Garbage
Anxiety’s Prosody
Eternity’s Taciturnity
Boon
Continuity
from Glare
Shot Glass
Birthday Poem to My Wife
A Few Acres of Shiny Water
In View of the Fact
Speaking
Frumpy Cronies
Shuffled Marbles
Don’t Rush on My Account
Run Ragged
“When the bubbles of nothingness rise”

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ISBN: 978-1-931082-93-8 155 pages

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