Collected Poems 1951 To 1971 Book

A.R. Ammons (1926-2001) was one of the major American poets of the 20th century and certainly recognized as such - though he had not been much of an academic, on the strength of his first couple of volumes alone Cornell University invited him on board and he taught many during his decades there. All the same, Ammons sometimes does seem to exist aloof from the poetry scene even in his own country, and he virtually never alludes to his poetic forebears or overtly draws on any kind of American or European tradition of literature or visual arts.

Ammons' Collected Poems 1951-1971 compiles the seven collections he had published to date - the book-length poem Tape for Turn of the Year, however, is not included and must be found separately. The book's contents make absolutely no reference to the titles of the earlier collections, instead in the table of contents the poems are grouped according to the years they were written: 1951-1955, 1956-1960, etc.

What distinguished Ammons' poetry here in its early years was a keen eye for observation of the natural landscape in terms of geology, flora and fauna, along with a knowledge of the hard sciences (physics, chemistry). The two concerns are perfectly joined in "Mechanism", probably my favourite Ammons poem, where a bird is examined as an intricate machine:



...heat kept by a feathered skin:
the living alembic, body heat maintained (bunsen
burner under the flask
so the chemistries can proceed, reaction rates
interdependent, self-adjusting, with optimum
efficiency-the vessel firm, the flame
staying: isolated, contained reactions!...

Another poem that captures at peak quality Ammons' powers of observations is the celebrated "Corson's Inlet", found here in this collection.

Placed at the end of the book are three long poems, "Essay on Poetics", "Hibernaculum", and "Extremes and Moderations". These show another side of Ammons, which I find the downside. Ammons wrote long poems by deciding on a fixed format (stanzas of three lines each, say) and then every morning hammering away at his typewriter about whatever he had on his mind - readers will know this was his working method because he plainly says so within the poem. While some of the metaphors and eloquence are impressive, I started to get tired of the repetitive stream-of-conscious. When lofty poetry gives way to dull mentions of the weather outside (Ammons likes to mention that it has snowed or is below freezing, these long poems a winter thing) or doing the shopping in town, the magical mood is spoiled.

Ultimately some of the poems here in this volume still move me years after I first read them, but my overall impression is that Ammons should have been more self-critical, subjecting those long poems to a severe editing process that cuts out those mundane remarks, and suppressing some of the weaker short poems. At nearly 400 pages there is too much here of middling quality that can obscure the good stuff.

Note that a new two-volume edition of Ammons' collected poems appeared in 2017, which includes also the material here. However, that hardcover has been criticized for its glued binding that will not last. My hardcover of the original Collected Poems 1951-1971, on the other hand, has a tough binding, and anyone who wants to buy this poetry and keep it in their library for the long haul might want to seek out this 1970s printing instead of the more recent collected works.