A garrulous creature.

Amy Clampitt

Love, Amy: The Selected Letters of Amy Clampitt,

Edited by Willard Spiegelman.

Columbia University Press, 336 pages, $39.50

Some thirty years before she began rubbing shoulders with the likes of Ted Hughes and Kurt Vounegut and captivating poetry readers with the rich lyric compression of her first volume, The Kingfisher (1983), Amy Clampirt warned her brother Philip, in the midst of a particularly long letter: "I see you skipping lines already, or at least wishing the creature would come to the point. But the creature is garrulous, you know, and besides the point, if you skip at all, is likely to become invisible." One cannot help but feel these lines reaching across three decades to snap their playful admonition at Clampitt's contemporary readers as well. Skimmers, beware: Though her densely intelligent, complex poems are never garrulous, they will not yield their bounty without the kind of concentrated attention to nuance and style that won Clampitt herself such high regard when she finally began to publish them at the age of fifty-eight. There is a great gulf fixed between obscurity and difficulty, and her poems always fall safely on the latter shore. Of course the particular demands of her style become a little less startling when we discover that she immersed herself in Dante and T. S. Eliot as a young woman, trekked through The Faerie Queene on the New York subway, and considered Henry James, that modern master of elegant syntactic intricacy, her very own "sort of private guiding light."

These insights into Clampirt's expansive reading habits are only part of what makes Willard Spiegelman's sleek, superbly edited selection of her letters such an engaging read. While acclaimed poets of her generation like Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, and Robert Lowell were shattering the literary idols of the 1950S and 1960S, Clampitt was thumbing through encyclopedias as a reference librarian at the Audubon Society in New York, inspecting paintings and statuary on pilgrimages through Italy, and shuffling in and out of prison cells in protest of the Vietnam war ("I've now been in jail, the honest-to-God lockup" she wrote during what she should later call her "politicking days" "and what's more that was my second arrest"). By the time The New Yorker published the first of her poems, the ecstatic flights of "confessional" poetry had come and gone, and American readers were apparently hungry for a weightier, more difficult sensibility. Despite its almost preternaturally patient incubation period, Clampitt's literary vocation seems to have been inexorable from the start. "I feel as if I could write a whole history of English literature" she declared while toiling over her never-to-be-published novel in 1956: "The reason being, apparently, that I feel I am in it."

Though deeply informed by her lifelong love for New York City, her best-known poems (like "Beach Glass" and "A Hermit Thrush") meditate scrupulously on the flora and fauna of the natural world, so it's informative to spot their distant origins in the ornithological conundrums she puzzled over at the Audubon Society or to find her empathizing with other exotic though not-so-garrulous creatures: "There are times when I feel closer to the flamingos, isolated in their salty fastnesses.... It is as though they had more life in them than most of the people one sees. But of course that is unfair" she adds with a mischief typical throughout these letters, "whether to the people or to the flamingos I'm not quite sure" But more delightful still is trying to keep pace with her swift, restless imagination as it leaps unpredictably from the latest Brancusi sculptures at the Guggenheim or a Handel oratorio at Carnegie Hall to the curious feeding patterns of the newly arrived chickadees in Central Park. Though she'd rather tramp through a real bog than the muck and mess of literary gossip, Clampitt does permit herself the occasional rumination on the state of poetry--"Is it W[illiam] C[arlos] Williams who's to blame for the current monotony of manner?," she asks prophetically in 1979--and her speculations are invariably on target.

Strangely enough, the most satisfying result of this collection is the revelation of the drastic difference between the style of Clampitt's letters and that of her poetry. The smooth, lucid prose of her letters always reminds us that the verbal athleticism of her verse, its Whitmanesque catalogues and alliterative clusters of adjectives (what she calls poetry's "fricative husk"), is the work of a highly conscious, purposeful artisan. The difference stands in judgment of much contemporary vers libre, which is often lacking in the unique marks left by the slow, arduous labor of a mind as it sifts and strains its rough-hewn intuitions through the sieve of order and constraint. Spiegelman's impeccable and (as only the best are) subtle editorial decisions make this volume a rare pleasure for those readers still interested in witnessing a nimble imagination transform its raw material into the cunning, deliberate artifice of verse.

Forthcoming in The New Criterion:

Who was Leigh Hunt? by Brooke Allen

Dumas gastronomique by David Fromkin

W. H. Auden today by David Yezzi

Shakespiracy theory by David Propson

Translating Virgil by Sarah Ruden

Dryden in his time & ours by R.J. Stove