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Critical Essays on American LiteratureJames Nagel, Series Editor, University of GeorgiaG. K. Halls three series of critical essays give comprehensive coverage of major authors worldwide and throughout history.The full range of literary traditions and schools is represented.Each new volume is carefully conceived and developed to fill a gap in the literary criticism available today.Volume editors are established authorities on the lives, works, and critical receptions of their subjects.They are uniquely qualified to ensure the spectrum of critical controversies, trends, and techniques inspired by their subjects in their own countries and abroad, in their own eras and today.Each volume features:an introduction which provides the reader with a lucid overview of criticism from its beginningsilluminating controversies, evaluating approaches, and sorting out the schools of thought the most influential reviews and the best of reprinted scholarly essaysa section devoted exclusively to reviews and reactions by the subjects contemporariesoriginal essays, new translations, and revisions commissioned especially for the seriespreviously unpublished materialssuch as interviews, lost letters, and manuscript fragments a bibliography of the subjects writings and interviews a name and subject indexThis is the first collection of reviews and essays to appear on this major contemporary poet in twelve years.The volume opens with an historic overview of Ammons and the critical response to his work, which began in 1956 with his first book Ommateum .The book continues through Ammonss Garbage, which won the National Book Award in 1994, and also contains two important interviews with Ammons centering on the importance of myth and religion in his life and on his relation to the American South, where he was born.Critical Essays on A.R. Ammons makes accessible in one volume the best commentary currently available on this postmodern American, transcendentalist myth-maker. ... Read more

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This book collects many of the poems that A. R. Ammons wrote between 1964 and 1970. The poems here include brief lyrics and such longer works as "Summer Session 1968" and "Guitar Recicativos."The critic Harold Bloom writes, "With the publication of his Selected Poems (1968), soon after turning forty, A. R. Ammons quietly demonstrated a unique and central position in recent American poetry. . . . Recognition, as is always the case with a poetry difficult and central, has come slowly, but critics now begin to see in Ammons what he is: the maker of a body of poetry that fulfills Emerson's prophecy by addressing itself to life 'with sufficient plainness and with sufficient profoundness.'" ... Read more

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Lake Effect Country is the newest collection by the poet whom the critic Josephine Jacobsen has described as "a formidable and outstandingly original contributor to the best of American poetry."Presenting the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for 1981 to Ammons's A Coast of Trees Richard Locke, editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, said, in part: "In the thirty years since A. R. Ammons published his first poems, he has fashioned a body of work that achieves a rare amplitude, specific gravity, and high seriousness. He is a poet of the American Sublime—a nature poet, as we say—standing in the tradition of Wordsworth, Emerson, and Whitman. Amidst the hue and cry of contemporary poetical factions, his work pursues its own integrity: clear, unblinking in its self-knowledge, remarkable for its radiant density of argument and feeling." ... Read more

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Ammons's poetic genius has always been at home in forms ranging from brief lyrics to longer works.In the present volume—the first since his highly acclaimed Lake Effect Country—readers will find superb examples of work in both forms. "The Ridge Farm," which begins the book, and "Tombstones," at its center, are fine longer meditations, while "Motion's Holdings," the concluding section, contains a number of his best new shorter poems. The book is proof, once again, that Ammons is one of our major American poets. ... Read more

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Diversifications is a collection of shorter poems by the poet whose Collected Poems won the National Book Award.The poems are on a diversity of subjects, but through them all runs the strong unity of vision that has led critic Geoffrey Hartman to acclaim Ammons as "a major American poet" (New York Times Book Review). "If his importance was suspected before," wrote the poet John Ashbery in The New York Review of Books, "it is now confirmed." Ammons came late to poetry, and has come even more lately into national recognition. That recognition is solid, however, and can only be increased by this, his latest volume. ... Read more

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In the poetry of A. R. Ammons, Helen Vendler has written, "the scientific world is beautifully in balance with the perceptual one." Originally published in 1982, this collection reminds us why Ammons must be read by all those who would understand our age and one of its most brilliant voices. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A Great Place to Start
Ammons passed away recently, leaving behind a great body of work.This volume is one of, if not the, best example of his short lyrics.His word-play reflects a deep respect and understanding of the word as well as nature.The publishers chose a great book to republish in honor of his death. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

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I used to own a copy of this, but it got lost along the way.The only poem from it that I remember by name is "Nellie Meyers," which stays with me years later, though I don't know why.I think because it and other parts of the book are nearly completely unguarded, in an innocent way.Perhaps it is on the other end of the spectrum from Glare. ... Read more

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Mr. Ammons' poetry has appeared in such publications as the Hudson Review, The Nation (for which he was at one time poetry editor), the New York Times, Poetry, and the Partisan Review.

Ommateum, his first book, was published in 1955, and was followed in 1964 by Expressions of Sea Level. Corsons Inlet and Tape for the Turn of the Year were published in 1965 by Cornell University Press. In 1966, Mr. Ammons received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for creative writing in poetry.

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Set in Motion collects for the first time the prose writings of A. R. Ammons, one of our most important and enduring contemporary poets. Hailed as a major force in American poetry by such redoubtable critics as Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler, Ammons has reflected upon the influences of luminaries like Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Frost, Stevens, and Williams while creating a compelling style and an artistic vision uniquely his own.
Set in Motion includes essays, reviews, and interviews as well as a selection of 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.
A. R. Ammons is the author of Sphere, A Coast of Trees, and Garbage and was recently the editor of The Best American Poetry 1994. His awards include the MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, the Bollingen Prize, two National Book Awards, and prizes from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Book Critics Circle. He is Goldwin Smith Professor of Poetry, Cornell University.
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