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Amy Clampittwas born and brought
up in New Providence, Iowa, graduated from Grinnell College, and from
that time on lived mainly in New York City. Her first full-length
collection, The Kingfisher, published in 1983, was followed in
1985 by What the Light Was Like, in 1987 by Archaic
Figure, and in 1990 by Westward. A Silence Opens, her last
book, appeared in 1994.
The recipient in 1982 of a Guggenheim
Fellowship, and in 1984 of an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, she
was made a MacArthur Prize Fellow in 1992. She was a member of the
American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a Writer in Residence at
the College of William and Mary, Visiting Writer at Amherst College, and
Grace Hazard Conkling Visiting Writer at Smith College.
She died
in September 1994.
In the Author's Own Words
The following excerpt from "Providence," an essay Amy Clampitt wrote at
age 70, suggests the immense power that nature held for her and her
early realization the Eden was to be transitory.
"It is the twenty-sixth of April, 1923, I am not yet three years old . .
. My father's sister Edith . . . is leading me past barns and through
feedlots to the outermost grove. What holds these details in place is
the sight, out under those trees, of a bed of violets whose hue I cannot
reach except by the way of a later metaphor: the contained intensity of
a body of water. It is as though I became in that instant aware of
edges, shores, boundaries, limitations. The shell had cracked: an
exodus, an expulsion, was under way."
Photo: Thomas Victor
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THE
COLLECTED POEMS OF AMY CLAMPITT
by Amy Clampitt
When
Amy Clampitt's first book of poems, The Kingfisher, was published
in January 1983, the response was jubilant. The poet was sixty-three
years old, and there had been no debut like hers in recent memory. "A
dance of language," said May Swenson. "A genius for places," wrote J. D.
McClatchy, and the New York Times Book Review said, "With the
publication of her brilliant first book, Clampitt immediately merits
consideration as one of the most distinguished contemporary poets."
She went on to publish four more collections in the next eleven
years, the last one, A Silence Opens, appearing in the year she
died.
Now, for the first time, the five collections are brought
together in a single volume, allowing us to experience anew the
distinctiveness of Amy Clampitt's voice: the brilliant language--an
appealing mix of formal and everyday expression--that poured out with
such passion and was shaped in rhythms and patterns entirely her
own.
Amy Clampitt's themes are the very American ones of place
and displacement. She, like her pioneer ancestors, moved frequently, but
she wrote with lasting and deep feeling about all sorts of
landscapes--the prairies of her Iowa childhood, the fog-wrapped coast of
Maine, and places she visited in Europe, from the western isles of
Scotland to Italy's lush countryside. She lived most of her adult life
in New York City, and many of her best-known poems, such as "Times
Square Water Music" and "Manhattan Elegy," are set there.
She did
not hesitate to take on the larger upheavals of the twentieth
century--war, Holocaust, exile--and poems like "The Burning Child" and
"Sed de Correr" remind us of the dark nightmare lurking in the
interstices of our daily existence.
It is impossible to speak of
Amy Clampitt's poetry without mentioning her immense, lifelong love of
birds and wildflowers, a love that produced some of her most profound
images--like the kingfisher's "burnished plunge, the color / of felicity
afire," which came "glancing like an arrow / through landscapes of
untended memory" to remind her of the uninhabitable sorrow of an affair
gone wrong; or the sun underfoot among the sundews, "so dazzling / . . .
that, looking, / you start to fall upward."
The Collected
Poems offers us a chance to consider freshly the breadth of Amy
Clampitt's vision and poetic achievement. It is a volume that her many
admirers will treasure and that will provide a magnificent introduction
for a new generation of readers.
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