Customer Reviews

Glare

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Incredibly it's really difficult to find A. R. Ammons poetry in bookshops in the UK. As far as I know his work isn't actually published here & so enthusiasts have to rely on specialist shops or on ordering his books (from internet bookstores or elsewhere). I first came across his worksevseral years ago in an anthology of American verse - & I've been hooked ever since. 'Glare' is a spectacular display of Ammon's deceptively easy-looking conversational style. Confident, funny, disarmingly direct, it touches on the wonderful & terrible business of living & growing old. The language is razor edged & playfully fuzzy - in exactly the right places & amounts. The long poem (of which 'Glare' is a very special example) has tripped-up many a gifted poet, but this has the sustained brilliance of someone competely at home with the form, someone who knows how to set poetic pace & rhythm to fit the task in hand. On a more commonplace note, it's a very engaging read. A book you can dip in & out of or settle down with. A book full of sparkiling wit, occasional glittering nuggets of wisdom, old-geezerish grumbling, rambling, ranting & poetry that will 'lift the top of your head off' as someone once said. He should be in the shops here. U.K. publishers please note.

Ammons was a master of the concise lyric, the witty aphorism, and the unusual nature narrative: a dialogue between a man and a mountain, for example. But he shines in his long poems, his book-length poems, of which "Glare" is the final example. The poem enacts the workings of an expansive supple probing ever-restless mind as it turns over all that comes at it centripetally as if it occupied the center of the universe. In a sense he did that as well as any American poet since Robert Frost. That is one measure of his greatness. There are others in the glare of mourning.

Archie expresses so many of your own thoughts, but much better than you'd ever dare to, even if you could. He's funny and cool, and I loved this book. Saying anything highfalutin about Ammons, I will leave to the real critics. I just love him.

Here this master of the book-length poem constructs a long poem different from other long poems of his, at the height of his command over poetics. This is a book of thoughts; he prefers the word in a conceptual space over the word as image. He also has a crazy sense of humor. Sections of this long poem are sectioned into very small units, & the form of 2-line stanzas is almost (but not quite) constanr throughout the book. The poems move as you would imagine the sphere on the cover would roll -- with a steady, hard arcing sound. I don't know this for sure yet, but I have a feeling Ammons liked associating his poetry with spheres so much because spheres are the shapes with the greatest surface area to volume ratio, & his words are just as voluminous in their terseness. In other news, his poetry in this book is its own very exciting avant-garde. Until his death on 25 Feb, 2001, more & more throughout his life, he was always creating wholly new spaces for poetry to move through. This his last book keeps moving.

There are more insights into language and life on any given page of this book than any poet has pulled off since, maybe, Auden. And I like Archie better than Auden. I agree with Harold Bloom: this poem is probably immortal.

The writing in this book all bears Ammons's mark of experimental, architectonic genius. He writes with severe intellect & a kooky sense of humor. He tends to prefer abstract thinking to emotion or physical objects or location. Gripping read.