A garrulous creature.(Love, Amy: The Selected Letters of Amy Clampitt)(Book review)

Amy Clampitt

Love, Amy: The Selected Letters of Amy Clampitt,

Edited by Willard Spiegelman.

Columbia University Press, 336 pages, $39.50

Some thirty years before she began rubbing shoulders with the likes of Ted Hughes and Kurt Vounegut and captivating poetry readers with the rich lyric compression of her first volume, The Kingfisher (1983), Amy Clampirt 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 Clampirt'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 ...