A. R. Ammons

A collection of over sixty-eight poems by American poet A.R. Ammons in which he makes observations of the natural world and speculates about philosophical topics.

Glare is a superb long poem by the contemporary master of the form, comprising two sections, "Strip" and "Scat Scan." It demonstrates, yet again, why A. R. Ammons's poetic voice is a national treasure: by turns cosmic, self-inflating, self-deflating, eloquent, intimate, bawdy, comic, precise - and always unmistakably his own.

Set in Motion includes essays, reviews, and interviews as well as a selection of A. R. Ammons's poems, with commentary from the author about their inspiration and effects. He takes up the questions that have been central to American poetry over the last forty years and connects them to the larger enterprise of living in a difficult, changing world. At a moment when the arts are under attack, Ammons reminds us of the crucial role poetry plays in teaching us to recognize and use sources of understanding that are irreducible to statement.

With characteristic economy, A. R. Ammons writes that "Brink Road lies off NY 96 between Candor and Catatonk." This upstate stretch of road provides the title for his new collection, its very name suggesting the sense, found in many of these poems, that we are ever in transition from one state of mind or feeling to another, and always on the edge of revelation. The more than 150 poems in Brink Road date from 1973 to the present and none has previously appeared in book form. They deal with Ammons's lifelong concerns with language, mortality, and the beauties and impersonal forces underlying the natural world with the elegance, wit, and ruminative gravity that are his signature qualities as a poet. The concluding work, "Summer Place," is a long poem that demonstrates his mastery of this form as it unfolds the quotidian events of the poet's summer vacation.

A collection of short poems written by A. R. Ammons between 1951 and 1977.