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A Coast of Trees
This collection of shorter poems won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1981.
Of this volume, the noted critic Harold Bloom has written, "A Coast of Trees represents A. R. Ammons at his strongest and most eloquent in the lyric mode. The book is an achievement fully comparable to his Uplands and Briefings. Among the poems likely to assume a permanent place in the Ammonsian (and American) canon are the majestic title lyric and 'Swells,' 'Easter Morning,' 'Keepsake,' 'Givings,' and 'Persistences.' Again Ammons has confirmed his vital continuities with the central Whitmanian tradition of our poetry, and his crucial place in that panoply."
- GenresPoetry
66 pages, Paperback
First published December 31, 1981
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99 people want to read
About the author
A.R. Ammons
51 books64 followersArchie Randolph Ammons was born outside Whiteville, North Carolina, on February 18, 1926. He started writing poetry aboard a U. S. Navy destroyer escort in the South Pacific. After completing service in World War II, he attended Wake Forest University and the University of California at Berkeley.
His honors included the Academy's Wallace Stevens Award, the Poetry Society of America's Robert Frost Medal, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
He lived in Ithaca, New York, where he was Goldwin Smith Professor of Poetry at Cornell University until his retirement in 1998. Ammons died on February 25, 2001.
His honors included the Academy's Wallace Stevens Award, the Poetry Society of America's Robert Frost Medal, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
He lived in Ithaca, New York, where he was Goldwin Smith Professor of Poetry at Cornell University until his retirement in 1998. Ammons died on February 25, 2001.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
July 20, 2021
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 1981.
In short this is the kind of poetry that is better if read aloud.
It did not resonate with me - not a lot of imagery. And I was hoping - given the title - that it would be more nature oriented than it was.
3 stars.
In short this is the kind of poetry that is better if read aloud.
It did not resonate with me - not a lot of imagery. And I was hoping - given the title - that it would be more nature oriented than it was.
3 stars.
December 4, 2022
3.5
A lot of these poems fell somewhat flat for me but the collection made up for it (at least in part) with its elegant seasonal structure and a few standouts.
Favorites:
In Memoriam Mae Nobblitt
Swells
Wiring
An Improvisation for the Stately Dwelling
A lot of these poems fell somewhat flat for me but the collection made up for it (at least in part) with its elegant seasonal structure and a few standouts.
Favorites:
In Memoriam Mae Nobblitt
Swells
Wiring
An Improvisation for the Stately Dwelling
February 18, 2026
2026
The thing about poetry is that it demands to be read multiple times. Once to get the words in the brain, twice to begin to understand the poem, and a couple more times to digest theme and overall vibes.
I sifted through A. R. Ammons’s poems in A Coast of Trees many times to grasp their full meaning. It’s been many years since I’ve picked up a book of poetry and really read it the way I believe poetry is meant to be read. Despite its short length, this book of poems took a few days to truly get into the rhythm. I found it best to read these in the morning after I’d been up for a while and having turned on some soothing music. If the weather had been more ideal (read: not so freaking cold), I probably would have read them outside or taken these poems on a walk to a nature center or around my neighborhood because they would have affected me even more that way.
Several poems caught my eye, but my favorite in this selection is “Density.” I kept coming back to it and have read it more than any other in the collection. It begins with “A bluejay’s the clarified/ bush’s only ornament:” and that vivid image captured me and held me through the rest of the short poem. The ending, “winter/ putting so much/ away leaves too/ much room to see,” is a lovely image to dwell on and reminds me of the clarity of winter, of how the snow throws so much into perspective. I could really sit with and dissect this poem for days. Maybe I’ll type it up and put it in my office.
Another favorite, “Breaking Out,” expresses the desire to fly and leave the world behind but to finally realize that the speaker is not buoyant enough, that they do not belong to the air but to the earth. The final lines stick with me: “let go [the balloons] have put me down/ I was an earth thing all along/ my feet are catching in the brush.”
Ammons effortlessly blends snapshot observations on nature with life’s inner contemplations. Throughout this short collection (only 52 pages), themes of loss and grief, acceptance and appreciation of natural beauty permeate each poem.
The thing about poetry is that it demands to be read multiple times. Once to get the words in the brain, twice to begin to understand the poem, and a couple more times to digest theme and overall vibes.
I sifted through A. R. Ammons’s poems in A Coast of Trees many times to grasp their full meaning. It’s been many years since I’ve picked up a book of poetry and really read it the way I believe poetry is meant to be read. Despite its short length, this book of poems took a few days to truly get into the rhythm. I found it best to read these in the morning after I’d been up for a while and having turned on some soothing music. If the weather had been more ideal (read: not so freaking cold), I probably would have read them outside or taken these poems on a walk to a nature center or around my neighborhood because they would have affected me even more that way.
Several poems caught my eye, but my favorite in this selection is “Density.” I kept coming back to it and have read it more than any other in the collection. It begins with “A bluejay’s the clarified/ bush’s only ornament:” and that vivid image captured me and held me through the rest of the short poem. The ending, “winter/ putting so much/ away leaves too/ much room to see,” is a lovely image to dwell on and reminds me of the clarity of winter, of how the snow throws so much into perspective. I could really sit with and dissect this poem for days. Maybe I’ll type it up and put it in my office.
Another favorite, “Breaking Out,” expresses the desire to fly and leave the world behind but to finally realize that the speaker is not buoyant enough, that they do not belong to the air but to the earth. The final lines stick with me: “let go [the balloons] have put me down/ I was an earth thing all along/ my feet are catching in the brush.”
Ammons effortlessly blends snapshot observations on nature with life’s inner contemplations. Throughout this short collection (only 52 pages), themes of loss and grief, acceptance and appreciation of natural beauty permeate each poem.
August 6, 2020
5/31
A. R. Ammons was one of my poetry teacher’s poetry teacher. And this collection is so connected to nature, philosophy, death, impermanence, permanence, and how we are “emptied full.”
#sealeychallenge #arammons
From “Persistences”
still, from our own ruins,
we thrash out the
snakes and mice,
shoo the lean ass away,
and plant a row of something:
we know,
we say to the wind, but we will
come back again and back:
in debris we make a holding as
insubstantial and permanent as mirage.
A. R. Ammons was one of my poetry teacher’s poetry teacher. And this collection is so connected to nature, philosophy, death, impermanence, permanence, and how we are “emptied full.”
#sealeychallenge #arammons
From “Persistences”
still, from our own ruins,
we thrash out the
snakes and mice,
shoo the lean ass away,
and plant a row of something:
we know,
we say to the wind, but we will
come back again and back:
in debris we make a holding as
insubstantial and permanent as mirage.
January 24, 2023
Some worthwhile passages, but fewer and more far between that I had hoped for. Lesson learned: stick with complications of “Selected” or “Greatest” works when satiating one’s curiosity for a new and unfamiliar poet.
December 5, 2022
this was good! I think ammons was meant to be a philosopher (metaphysician probably) but tripped and fell into poetry
November 14, 2023
A wonderful collection. Philosophical and nature-based. A continuation of the New York’s quotidian poetics.
July 23, 2008
So I read this whole book. Ammons' 'naive' style wore me down after a while. Maybe I'm in a middle ground -- reading the poems in bulk so they don't seem as fresh; not having read close enough to see the breakthroughs each represent.
Here's Stephen Burt's note on Ammons's style.
"The German poet, playwright, and critic Friedrich Schiller thought there were two kinds of poets: 'sentimental' and 'naive' (and neither term, for Schiller, was an insult). Sentimental poets, he said, are self-conscious and retrospective; they 'look for lost nature' in the people and things they write about. Their characteristic works, Schiller believed, sound carefully wrought, conclusive, even if written at high speed. Naive poets, on the other hand, seem to 'be nature'—poetry seems to come out of them as wind from the sky, or leaves from the trees, as if it were their native speech. Naive poets often sound as if they never revise, even when we know they've worked hard on many drafts; their poetry seems to flow and does not want to end.... A.R. Ammons (1926-2001) was in Schiller's sense the most 'naive' of America's very good poets. His poems, written over nearly 50 years, include almost every kind of speech-act a person can say, from shrugs to prophecies, and they sound spontaneous even when it's clear they reflect decades of thought."
Here's Stephen Burt's note on Ammons's style.
"The German poet, playwright, and critic Friedrich Schiller thought there were two kinds of poets: 'sentimental' and 'naive' (and neither term, for Schiller, was an insult). Sentimental poets, he said, are self-conscious and retrospective; they 'look for lost nature' in the people and things they write about. Their characteristic works, Schiller believed, sound carefully wrought, conclusive, even if written at high speed. Naive poets, on the other hand, seem to 'be nature'—poetry seems to come out of them as wind from the sky, or leaves from the trees, as if it were their native speech. Naive poets often sound as if they never revise, even when we know they've worked hard on many drafts; their poetry seems to flow and does not want to end.... A.R. Ammons (1926-2001) was in Schiller's sense the most 'naive' of America's very good poets. His poems, written over nearly 50 years, include almost every kind of speech-act a person can say, from shrugs to prophecies, and they sound spontaneous even when it's clear they reflect decades of thought."
May 12, 2020
A quickly-read collection, these poems are grounded in nature imagery. No poem seemed to jump off the page to me that strongly and without a consistently explored theme, I felt that the poems needed something more in terms of structure or style. Perhaps, I needed to have spent more time with these.
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April 5, 2013811.54 A521c 1981
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews