Brink Road

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.