What the Light Was Like

by Amy Clampitt

Forty poems deal with the people, plants and animals of New England, the English poet John Keats, and the landscape of New York City

Genres: Poetry

110 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Amy Clampitt was brought up in New Providence, Iowa. She wrote poetry in high school, but then ceased and focused her energies on writing fiction instead. She graduated from Grinnell College, and from that time on lived mainly in New York City.

To support herself, she worked as a secretary at the Oxford University Press, a reference librarian at the Audubon Society, and a freelance editor. Not until the mid-1960s, when she was in her forties, did she return to writing poetry. Her first poem was published by The New Yorker in 1978. In 1983, at the age of sixty-three, she published her first full-length collection, The Kingfisher.

Clampitt was the recipient of a 1982 Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship (1992), and she was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Poets. She died of cancer in September 1994.

Reviews

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

I knew really about nothing for amy & thus no expectations . this was a HUge deal !! an incredible work that really whacked me through it's delightful and baroque she's clearly learned lessons from hopkins but no mistake this is a unique voice too. I will not be leaving amy alone anytime soon. As I say, baroque, which is a theme for me lately. Luscious lines like the squandered volupté of lemon- / yellow-petaled roses' luscious flimflam are not to everybody's taste but I think this Works for her perfectly, she carries it with a confidence I think possibly deriving from the strength of her opening lines ('Cats, as a rule, don't take to travel', 'The gooseberry's no doubt an oddity', 'Stealth of the flood tide, the moon dark', 'Green-gold, the garden leans into the room).

She's a beautiful study and I think deserves a little renaissance. I think all I'd heard of her was grouping her into that post-Plath group which frankly I don't see as an especially useful designator! in this case! indeed I'm a little sceptical of the (largely male) critical grouping of just about any young women poet writing in America in the late 60s-70s into this. Plath can be wonderful without forcing a movement onto new writers. what do I know

[Humphrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is basically impossible to write a better collection than The Kingfisher, but if this volume has fewer highs they are of no lesser elevation. "Cloudberry Summer" and "Urn Burial and the Butterfly Migration" are masterpieces. "Black Buttercups" executes her scathing Iowa tone well, and "Low Tide at Schoodic" and "What the Light Was Like" are good as well. The metropolis poems are perhaps the least accomplished, but "Reedbeds of the Hackensack" is very nice. I didn't consider the poems of the Keats section to be standouts individually, but I found the project of poetic biography intriguing nonetheless.

[Laura · Rating 1 out of 5]

Astonishing that this inert and tedious version of poetry was ever celebrated. Really. The fawning adulation was clearly a conservative move, in retrospect. A part of a larger tendency to promote work that supports a desire not to think or question. I am embarrassed for an era when I (in a used bookstore in NC) pick this up. I put it down. And I ask you: look around, what are we taking as precious now, that we shouldn’t?!

[Mauberley]

I had not read this since it was first published and, with the exception of the execrable ‘Voyages’, I enjoyed it very much. I think that my present taste is for a leaner sort of diction, the poet really does know how to sing.

[Tom Thompson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been reading this book for years. Amy Clampitt is a glorious writer in the tradition of Keats: every perception is both keen and enormous

[Courtney Johnston · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am very uncertain about my taste in poetry. I worry (you know, when I have nothing better to do) that when I reveal the poets I enjoy, people will react to me in the same way that I react to people who claim Dan Brown as one of their favourite authors.

I don't want to come across as a snob. It's more that when it comes to forms of art that I enjoy, I work hard not to be one of those people who says "I don't know much, but I know what I like". That to me signals not caring enough to keep pushing yourself further. Finding out what you don't like - being repulsed, having an unpleasant time, being bored - is important.

All this might seem to lead up to a rubbishing of this collection by American poet Amy Clampitt, but it's not. It's more that I've realised that the best way to understand poetry better is to read it more. And so I have started frequenting the poetry section at the public library, picking up books through those little clues you use when you're not sure of your ground - in this case, recognising Clampitt's name from the Harold Bloom anthology I recently read (although I realise now I didn't like Clampitt's poem in that collection, and instead had her confused with Adelaide Crapsey) and trusting the small, slim format of Faber and Faber poetry books.

I whipped through the book in a day - although I tried to slow myself by reading some of the poems, or sections of them, more than once, and occasionally reading them under my breath. I can see that reading more slowly is going to be important.

I was most taken by the first section of the collection, titled 'The Shore', of poems about the New England coastline. Having never visited that part of the States, I was seeing it through Clampitt's eyes and words. Mostly the poems focus on small details of the environment - the way a finger of light falls, as in a European painting, but only to illuminate "alders and barnacles and herring gulls at their usual squabbles"; herrings shoals in August; cloudberries

... these strangely sallow-
tinged, blandly baked-apple-
flavored thimble nubbins, singly borne, no
more than inches from the bog's
sour surface ...

My two favourite poems in this collection come from this section. One is the eponymous poem of the book's title, a story of the death of a lobsterman, who went out one morning and didn't come back:

... I find it
tempting to imagine what,
when the blood roared, overflowing its cerebral sluiceway,
and the iridescence

of his last perception, charring, gave way to unreversed,
irrevocable dark,
the light out there was like, that's always shifting - from
a nimbus gone berserk
to a single gorget, a cathedral train of blinking, or
the fogbound shroud

The second is 'Bertie Goes Hunting', about a cat, which captured me with its intricate rhythm and half-rhymes - fun to mouth and be surprised by. In full:

Dear beast, luxurious of pelt,
moon-orbed possessor of the
screen-door-unlatching paw,
the lurk that twitches in
the haunch at every

piebald quiver of out-in-the-
open; past the fern-flanked
porchside boundary; a froth
of goldenrod and timothy
absorbs his predatory

crouch-and-spring, quick-
silver underside of memory,
the lunge-evoking, paradisal
rustle of the underbrush, the
just-missed quarry:

his vanishings into a history
so dense with molecules, so
chary of the traceable, you
never quite believe that ata-
vism's only temporary --

that a la the silver lizards
Robert Frost purported to have
seen cascading down the
mountainside in slush-time,
this time the furry

entity you knew, if not quite
yet dissolved into a dew, will
have surrendered to the texture
of that habitat, the slither
of its understory.

Yet when you call the name you've
given him, that like a skipped
stone skims the surface of what-
ever's out there, something,
primed to be ready for a

game of shake-and-bake, a fondling
session, with the inevitable risk
of being laughed at -- is it habit,
is it altogether voluntary? --
brings him in a hurry.

There was one other fragment that hit me between the eyes - the melding of the reference of the Norse tree of life Yggdrasil and the druidic symbol of mistletoe to science and medicine, the contrast of small, hard, violent words like 'gout' and 'slit' with religious imagery, in'From a clinic waiting room':

Down in the bloodbank
the centrifuge, its branched transparent siphons
stripping the sap of Yggdrasil
from the slit arm of the donor, skims
the spinning corpuscules, cream-white
from hectic red. Below the pouched pack
dangled like a gout of mistletoe, the tubing
drips, drips from valve to valve to enter,
in a gradual procession, the cloistered
precincts of another body.

[Jonathan Koven · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clampitt has an unbelievable mastery over her vocabulary, use of sound, myriad of poetic forms, and ambiguity. I enjoyed reading and rereading these rich poems. There's an extended sequence in this that narrates John Keats' life and career, sort of like an epic poem, which I had fun with. Def would recommend to fellow poets and lovers of Literature with a capital L.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A master of form, an oracle of truth, arbiter of the real—a veritable dictionary and encyclopedia yet fully human, and female too, with a mystic’s eye and poet’s heart.

Favorites Poems:
“What the Light Was Like”
“From a Clinic Waiting Room”
“‘A Curfew”
“Urn-Burial and the Butterfly Migration”
“The Cooling Tower”
“A New Life”
“The Reedbeds of the Hackensack”
“Burial in Cypress Hill”
“The Godfather Returns to Color TV”

“O drifting apotheosis of dust
exhumed, who will unseal
the crypt locked up within
the shimmer of the chromosomes,
or harvest, from the alluvial
death-dance of these wrecked
galaxies, this risen residue
of milkweed leaf and honey,
rest for the body?”
—“Urn-Burial and the Butterfly Migration”

[Mills College Library]

811.54 C586L 1985