Customer Reviews

The Really Short Poems of A.R. Ammons

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Ammons is a poet who has excelled in free verse in both large and small doses. This collection, drawn from the briefest poems throughout his career, includes many not previously published in book form. The overall arrangement makes the book highly satisfying as a sequential experience,with each little poem part of an overall summing up; but the volume is also quite amenable to being taken up, read about in and put down at will, for those brief moments that may be gainfully filled with poetry. For those interested in nature, philosophy and ironies of life

There are some fun and expressive poems and lyrics here. Perhaps the ones I enjoyed best are the nature meditations, as "When the bee lands the morning glory bloom dips some and weaves". Some have the feel if not the rules of haiku. There are also more playful and bawdy poems here as in "Their sex life: One failure on Top of another" or "Coward: Bravery runs in my family". Others such as Chasm or Cleavage use the arrangement of the words on the page to complement the poetry. If you're not up for Ammon's book-length poems (e.g. Sphere or Garbage), this provides a good introduction.