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The Selected Poems
A. R. Ammons's selection of his work once again, as the critic Harold Bloom wrote of the earlier version, "makes available the very best of him." To the "visions of clarity and terror" in that volume the poet now adds the most important poems from his three books published since. The resulting collection is the essential starting place for new readers, the quarry for those familiar with his work. Among the new poems is "Easter Morning," which the critic Helen Vendler called "a classic poem . . . a revelation."
132 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1977
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357 people want to read
About the author
A.R. Ammons
50books63followersArchie Randolph Ammons was born outside Whiteville, North Carolina, on February 18, 1926. He started writing poetry aboard a U. S. Navy destroyer escort in the South Pacific. After completing service in World War II, he attended Wake Forest University and the University of California at Berkeley.
His honors included the Academy's Wallace Stevens Award, the Poetry Society of America's Robert Frost Medal, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
He lived in Ithaca, New York, where he was Goldwin Smith Professor of Poetry at Cornell University until his retirement in 1998. Ammons died on February 25, 2001.
His honors included the Academy's Wallace Stevens Award, the Poetry Society of America's Robert Frost Medal, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
He lived in Ithaca, New York, where he was Goldwin Smith Professor of Poetry at Cornell University until his retirement in 1998. Ammons died on February 25, 2001.
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
January 13, 2018
Who am I to rate poetry?
August 5, 2022
His favourite words are roil, whirl, whorl and swirl, and he overuses them, but that's okay, because he is honest enough about basically having assembled 100 pages of poems primarily about the wind and secondarily about birds and the sun. "I have appropriated the windy twittering of aspen leaves / into language, stealing something from reality like a / silverness" (87). He's great at enjambment and is an exemplary specimen of that late American, post-NY, Wallace Stevens, Harold Bloom intellectually hyperspecific new Thoreau nature poetry. "My subject's / still the wind still / difficult to / present / being invisible" (66). A lot of it repeats its rhetoric of abstraction, so the occasional conversational intimacies are marked, surprising, and effective. "the wind said / you know I'm / the result of / forces beyond my control / I don't hold it against you / I said / It's all right I understand" (10). I'll try to remember some of these when I am next in the wind.
September 4, 2016
A.R. Ammons' poems give off an air of transcendence through his observation of nature. A scientist, he posses a keen eye for things easily missed, while still finding and interpreting, as a spiritual man also, the inaudible expressions of the Artist through creation in a manner reminiscent of Thoreau and Whitman. His tone is more composed than I prefer, but colloquial, sincere (lacking any sarcasm), and strangely uplifting even in depicting garbage. Besides "Cason's Inlet," my favorites contained in this book are "The Pieces of My Voice," "Prodigal," "Expressions of Sea Level," "Still," "Clarity," "Cut the Grass," "Giving up Words with Words."
May 12, 2013
This collection receives a four star rating from me only because of the poem "Easter Morning" which is one of the most beautiful and insightful poems I have ever encountered. This is not to say I didn't enjoy the rest, in fact, I love Ammons style and the way he uses enjambment throughout his work. I suppose its because I read Easter Morning first, and then came to this work. While I enjoy nature, what got to me about Easter Morning, the utter humanity of it, was just not present in a lot of his other poems. But all-together this book is highly worth the read.
May 19, 2018
"So it came time/ for me to cede myself/ and I chose/ the wind/ to be delivered to// The wind was glad/ and said it needed all/ the body/ it could get/ to show its motions with". Conceptually rich and refreshing in tone and style.
January 22, 2022
I read this collection on the basis of a poem I read upon open the book to a random page...
This poem contains the humour of a poet who once referred to himself as a "drab pot" ("top bard" backwards). Otherwise, the poem is less remarkable in the collection, belonging to the free form poems that seem to get lost among the lengthier poems that are more formally inclined - most notably, the selection from TAPE FOR THE TURN OF THE CENTURY...
Another long poem of note, the selection from GLARE, is more characteristic of the poet's later style...
I must denounce, in the same poem, the poet's misogyny...
Overall, these longer poems failed to impress me, but there were always a few lines that grabbed my attention and redeemed the otherwise long-winded and excessive rhapsodizing on the poet's part...
I prefer the earlier, shorter poems. These poems are unencumbered by the poet's ambition, his preoccupation with the profound (or trying to sound profound). Ironically, the simplicity of these poems come across to me as being more profound than the longer poems. At their best, they are like Zen Koans...
I said
Mr. Schafer
did you get up to see the comet:
and
he said
Oh no
let it go by, I don't care:
- Dominion (pg. 43)
This poem contains the humour of a poet who once referred to himself as a "drab pot" ("top bard" backwards). Otherwise, the poem is less remarkable in the collection, belonging to the free form poems that seem to get lost among the lengthier poems that are more formally inclined - most notably, the selection from TAPE FOR THE TURN OF THE CENTURY...
today I
decided to write
a long
thin
poem
employing certain
classical considerations:
this
part of the poem is called the pro-
logue: it has to do with
the business of
getting started:
first the
Must
must be acknowledged...
- (pg. 28)
Another long poem of note, the selection from GLARE, is more characteristic of the poet's later style...
I see the eye-level silver shine of
the axe blade the big neighbour carried
at our house at dawn, and I see the
child carried off in arms to the woods,
see the sapling split and the child
passed through and the tree bound
back...
- (pg. 95)
I must denounce, in the same poem, the poet's misogyny...
...but I love women
so much, even the way you can talk
them into duplicity, I mean their
melting spirituality, like the
rose-warmth of nursing, just moves
me so much, I feel like saying,
please excise me, but are you sure
it would be all right if I mounted
you...
- (pg. 98)
Overall, these longer poems failed to impress me, but there were always a few lines that grabbed my attention and redeemed the otherwise long-winded and excessive rhapsodizing on the poet's part...
I'm alone too much: get
to think
other people
aren't people
- Tape for the Turn of the Year (pg. 37)
these self-monitorings create problems
where there are none: they fill
inanition with misery, when if you
can look about you and do things,
inanition goes away and so does the
misery...
- Glare (pg. 101)
I prefer the earlier, shorter poems. These poems are unencumbered by the poet's ambition, his preoccupation with the profound (or trying to sound profound). Ironically, the simplicity of these poems come across to me as being more profound than the longer poems. At their best, they are like Zen Koans...
I found a
weed
that had a
mirror in it
and that
mirror
looked in at
a mirror
in
me that
had a
weed in it
- Reflective (pg. 24)
April 28, 2018
Name-checked by no less a canon-maker than Harold Bloom as one of a handful of worthy contemporary poets, I found THE SELECTED POEMS by A.R. Ammons in my garage with thousands of other worthy titles I have collected for my own personal canon fodder, and decided to maybe even read one of them. I halted at the author’s name, which I scanned as if from an untranslated tongue. But the poems are less alien. They’re mostly grounded in nature, mountains and oceans. I know the earth fairly well, having spent much of my life there, so this familiarity got me past the strangeness of the poet’s name, which isn’t that weird but I’ll blame my reaction of lifelong dyslexia and its function of turning the comprehensible incomprehensible. That’s like poetry for me (or is it the other way around?). There might be more going on than I know, but I’m just trying to keep the words from skating off the page. Then I say, To hell with order, let the words fall where they might! I read the poem and go to the next poem, and before you know it I’ve read the book. Just like I did with this one.
July 5, 2024
This one took me a long time. I had to be in the right frame of mind to get anything out of these poems. I would pick up the book and quickly realize I was not getting anything. Other times, I would start reading and the words would start to flow and spark meaning in my head. When that happened, the poems were (mostly) splendidly meaningful, inspirational, melancholy, thought inspiring. Not to say I had to work hard to find meaning - rather, working too hard at it just defeated the purpose and I got no meaning. The trick was to just relax my mind and set my thoughts to the same meter he was writing in and let his meaning flow.
February 3, 2024
Sadly, in this volume, The Selected Poems Expanded Edition, with only one or two exceptions the author selected the wrong poems, expanded or not. This compilation was dedicated to Frederick Morgan, so possibly that is someone he did not like.
December 14, 2017
Wow, this is good stuff
November 23, 2017
A new favorite old poet
May 4, 2018
I think he just became my favorite American poet.
September 22, 2020
A great collection from a great poet. Playful, self-taught, and wisely human, Ammon’s was a people’s poet. Widely ranging and grounded, Whitman-like. Loved it!
December 15, 2021
In this collection, Ammons shucks off “periphery after periphery/ to the glassy vague gray parabolas/ and swoops of unnailable perception,� not quite able to “essentialize out the distilled/ form� in polished “glitter-stones� or “the face-brilliant core/ stone.� As an “amasser, heap shoveler� of details in these “chinks of truth self-making,� the poet still manages to remain parabolically vague and gray with “bumfuzzlement.� [“The Arc Inside and Out”]
Favorite Poems:
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“Corsons Inlet�
“Love Song�
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“PܲԻ�
“The City Limits�
“The Arc Inside and Out�
Favorite Poems:
“MԲDz�
“Corsons Inlet�
“Love Song�
ԱDZ�
“PܲԻ�
“The City Limits�
“The Arc Inside and Out�
December 24, 2021
Ammons is a great modern American poet. This collection contains his best. Worth the price just for “Corson’s Inlet.�
-Gregory Kerkman
-Gregory Kerkman
January 8, 2024
this is like if “country road take me home� was phrased in a more beautiful manner
January 2, 2022
"do not mourn the dead too much who bear no
knowledge, have no need or fear of pain,
and who never again must see death
come upon what does not wish to die"
knowledge, have no need or fear of pain,
and who never again must see death
come upon what does not wish to die"
December 8, 2024
As a lover of poetry, every once in a while you discover a poet who completely rocks your world. This year, for me, that poet was A.R. Ammons.
I'd heard of Ammons by name because he had popped up in various anthologies I'd read over the years but had never paid much heed to his poems for reasons I can't even remember. However, once I popped this book open, I was greeted by some of the most beautiful and visceral poems ever. So what makes his poems so good? Basically, the way he writes and how he does so is wholly singular and unique, in a way no other poet I've come across has been since Cummings.
It left me feeling like: How have I lived my entire life never having read Ammons? What a master! I will devour his poems.
I'd heard of Ammons by name because he had popped up in various anthologies I'd read over the years but had never paid much heed to his poems for reasons I can't even remember. However, once I popped this book open, I was greeted by some of the most beautiful and visceral poems ever. So what makes his poems so good? Basically, the way he writes and how he does so is wholly singular and unique, in a way no other poet I've come across has been since Cummings.
It left me feeling like: How have I lived my entire life never having read Ammons? What a master! I will devour his poems.
July 27, 2016
Where the center is
Read
April 5, 2013811.54 A521sp 1977
December 2, 2013
I've now done presentations on Ammons in two different classes and I just love his work more and more. I definitely recommend this collection!
August 14, 2014
After reading this collection I will have to say I like Ammons' shorter poems best. This collection has more medium to long poems, some of which are also excellent, but his short poems are the best.
February 2, 2015
Wonderful work, again.
June 26, 2007
My favorite poet.
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