Amy Clampitt sure-handedly set the gold standard for poetry in the waning decades of the twentieth century. Her work is a universe of grace. I've got three copies of this one--one for the bedside table, one for sneaking reacquaintance in the lower-left drawer of my office desk, and another for the slow-crawling intervals of the commute. When it comes to poetry, there haven't exactly been too many essential collections of late. But this is one.

Now here in one gorgeous volume is 496 pages of proof that this original and curious intellect once lived among us, and, having looked (and looked) at our time and many places, left us these hard-headed, light-filled poems.

Amy , You go girl! you certainly know your stuff

The first time I was introduced to Amy Clampitt was with the poem Dorset, reproduced in a waiting room magazine. I was struck by the contrast between her southern-sounding name and the richness of her vocabulary, which in my opinion, equals anything by the best 19th century British authors. The Dorset poem was from her first collection, The Kingfisher. I had to special order the book, and by the time I picked it up the staff in the bookstore had also ordered their own personal copies. In this collection, Clampitt's subjects range from fog, beach glass, kingfishers and cormorants, dank mornings, to the residue of love affairs, and grief surrounding the death of John Lennon. She juxtaposes words as deftly as Dylan Thomas, and it is only her contemporary references that remind us that she is of our times. If you love to be suprised by words, see the world through the eyes of one truly capable of capturing it through the medium of poetry. Read Amy Clampitt, a delightful anachronism for lovers of the English language.