Some thirty years before she began rubbing
shoulders with the likes of Ted Hughes and Kurt Vonnegut and
captivating poetry readers with the rich lyric compression of
her
first volume, The Kingfisher (1983), Amy Clampitt warned her
brother Philip, in the midst of a particularly long letter: “I
see you skipping lines already, or at least wishing the creature
would come to the point. But the creature is garrulous, you
know, and besides the point, if you skip at all, is likely to
become invisible.” One cannot help but feel these lines
reaching across three decades to snap their playful admonition at
Clampitt’s contemporary readers as well. Skimmers, beware: Though
her densely intelligent, complex poems are never garrulous, they
will not yield their bounty without the kind of concentrated
attention to nuance and style that won Clampitt herself such high
regard when she finally began to publish them at the age of
fifty-eight. There is a great gulf fixed between obscurity and
difficulty, and her poems always fall safely on the latter shore. Of
course the particular demands of her style become a little less
startling when we discover that she immersed herself in Dante and
T. S. Eliot as a young woman, trekked through The Faerie Queene
on the New York subway, and considered Henry James, that modern
master of elegant syntactic intricacy, her very own “sort of
private guiding light.”

These insights into Clampitt’s expansive reading habits are only
part of what makes Willard Spiegelman’s sleek, superbly edited
selection of her letters such an engaging read. While acclaimed
poets of her generation like Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, and
Robert Lowell were shattering the literary idols of the 1950s
and 1960s, Clampitt
was thumbing through encyclopedias as a
reference librarian at the Audubon Society in New York,
inspecting paintings and statuary on pilgrimages through Italy,
and shuffling in and out of prison cells in protest of the
Vietnam war (“I’ve now been in jail, the honest-to-God lockup,”
she wrote during what she should later call her “politicking
days,” “and what’s more that was my second arrest”). By
the time The New Yorker published the first of her poems, the
ecstatic flights of “confessional” poetry had come and gone, and
American readers were apparently hungry for a weightier, more
difficult sensibility. Despite its almost preternaturally patient
incubation period, Clampitt’s literary vocation seems to have
been inexorable from the start. “I feel as if I could write a
whole history of English literature,” she declared while toiling
over her never-to-be-published novel in 1956: “The reason being,
apparently, that I feel I am in it.”

Though deeply
informed by her lifelong love for New York City, her best-known
poems (like “Beach Glass” and “A Hermit Thrush”) meditate
scrupulously on the flora and fauna of the natural world, so it’s
informative to spot their distant origins in the ornithological
conundrums she puzzled over at the Audubon Society or to find her
empathizing with other exotic though not-so-garrulous creatures:
“There are times when I feel closer to the flamingos, isolated in
their salty fastnesses… . It is as though they had more life
in them than most of the people one sees. But of course that is
unfair,” she adds with a mischief typical throughout these
letters, “whether to the people or to the flamingos I’m not quite
sure.” But more delightful still is trying to keep pace with
her swift, restless imagination as it leaps unpredictably
from the
latest Brancusi sculptures at the Guggenheim or a Handel oratorio
at Carnegie Hall to the curious feeding patterns of the newly
arrived chickadees in Central Park. Though she’d rather
tramp through a real bog than the muck and mess of literary
gossip, Clampitt does permit herself the occasional rumination on
the state of poetry—“Is it W[illiam] C[arlos] Williams who’s to
blame for the current monotony of manner?,” she asks
prophetically in 1979—and her speculations are invariably on
target.

Strangely enough, the most satisfying result of this collection
is the revelation of the drastic difference between the style of
Clampitt’s letters and that of her poetry. The smooth, lucid
prose of her letters always
reminds us that the verbal
athleticism of her verse, its Whitmanesque catalogues and
alliterative clusters of adjectives (what she calls poetry’s
“fricative husk”), is the work of a highly
conscious, purposeful artisan.
The difference stands in judgment of much contemporary vers
libre, which is often lacking in the unique marks left by the
slow, arduous labor of a mind as it sifts and strains its
rough-hewn intuitions through the sieve of order and constraint.
Spiegelman’s impeccable and (as only the best are) subtle
editorial decisions make this volume a rare pleasure for those
readers still interested in witnessing a nimble imagination
transform its raw material into the cunning, deliberate artifice
of verse.