From Publishers Weekly
At the end of Brink Road is "Summer Place," a 45-page piece written in narrative triplets. While the jacket copy, like a warning sign, declares that this poem "unfolds the quotidian events of the poet's summer vacation," there is, fortunately, enough humor and sarcasm to make it fun. When this cranky and multiple award-winning poet/professor finds himself with nothing to do during a long July, he turns to self-effacement, colleague bashing ("John Hollander who knows so much about the art of/ poetry you wouldn't understand a thing he said") and undelighted, lecherous observations ("...coeds with the pear-like rondure/ sloping the dinky-little bicycle seats/ wouldn't it be fun to be leather...). The real problem with Ammons's latest trek is the 152 shorter works that line the way to "Summer Place." Often minimalist and obsessed with paradox, these poems are skeletons, their lines stacked like vertebrae ("where then do I/ belong: your/ belonging/ is to belong nowhere:/ what am I/ to be") or ribs of pastoral wonderment ("A shaded branch will through etiolation stretch, even though it has/ little sun to stretch with, to get into the sun").They tease the brain but rarely engage the heart.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Ammons' last book,
Garbage (1993), consisted of one wonderful long poem; his newest contains more than 150. This grand collection reflects Ammons' philosophical bent, his balancing act between the metaphysical lyricism of modern ontology and the trickier implications of teleology. Ammons perceives an unassailable connection between nature and the life of the mind, and he writes many traditional, if rarefied, poems about wind, clouds, and trees. His favorite natural form is "curvature" --a shape, force, and metaphor that he uses often. In "A Little Thing like That," for instance, he tells us that he much prefers the meanderings and "flexibility of brooks" (a flowing form of curvature) to the commanding presence of mountains. And he believes that poems should curve. In the self-revealing "Saying Saying Away," Ammons writes that poems flow into a "place where the distinction / between meaning and being is erased into the meaning of / being." A master of the couplet, Ammons has a Zen point of view and a voice that harmonizes well with e. e. cummings and Robert Frost.
Donna Seaman
