What do you think?
Rate this book
The Snow Poems
Critics and readers alike recognize Ammons's achievements: in 1973, his Collected Poems won the National Book Award for Poetry; in 1975, his long poem Sphere: The Form of a Motion was nominated for the National Book Award and received the Bollingen Prize for Poetry: in 1977, he received and award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. The Snow Poems, Ammons's twelfth book, is a major achievement by a major American Poet.
- GenresPoetry
306 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1977
1 person is currently reading
24 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.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
January 1, 2023
Ammons has done other books like this -- where the poems become a kind of journal, where he gets everything that passes through his consideration into the poems, whether those things are serious or silly, whether they are playful or formally inventive. I think my favorite of these efforts is his "Tape for the Turning of the Year." And, yes, that might be most interesting because he was constrained by the narrowness of the tape. He had to keep his lines to a certain length.
Here he does some formal play -- doubled lines, for instance -- that never seem to quite catch for me. He has jokes, sometimes adolescent potty jokes, that don't seem very funny to me, although I like the fact that they seem funny to him. But there is the whole range of emotion during this cold and snowy winter in upstate New York, and sometimes things break out that are absolutely gorgeous:
I was held by a power
beyond all but silence
to contain
a joy inexpressible,
inexcusable
standing not away or at an
opposite pole but
in the midst of which
grief
like high icy ghosts of
lombardies
slow-swayed!
Now the question would be -- do we have to go through all the casual tediousness to get to this and to enjoy this. Sometimes Ammons thought so, and sometimes I do too, although I'm never completely and consistently convinced.
Here he does some formal play -- doubled lines, for instance -- that never seem to quite catch for me. He has jokes, sometimes adolescent potty jokes, that don't seem very funny to me, although I like the fact that they seem funny to him. But there is the whole range of emotion during this cold and snowy winter in upstate New York, and sometimes things break out that are absolutely gorgeous:
I was held by a power
beyond all but silence
to contain
a joy inexpressible,
inexcusable
standing not away or at an
opposite pole but
in the midst of which
grief
like high icy ghosts of
lombardies
slow-swayed!
Now the question would be -- do we have to go through all the casual tediousness to get to this and to enjoy this. Sometimes Ammons thought so, and sometimes I do too, although I'm never completely and consistently convinced.
June 7, 2018
Ammons’ 1977 collection The Snow Poems is a poetic diary of a winter in upstate New York. I enjoyed Ammons’ Collected Poems, 1951-1971 and was happy to discover a major 20th-century poetic voice, but this slightly later effort is not very impressive at all.
The problem here is that this is really a diary, and an unexpurgated one. Ammons wrote whatever came to mind all winter, but then he did not trim any of what he had at the end, cutting out weaker material and leaving only the strong stuff. Instead, we get 292 pages of mainly weak stuff, where the insights to share and the impact on the reader are pretty few and far between.
Then, Ammons’ themes are pretty repetitive, centering around the temperature outside (so many poems start by noting how many degrees it is out, or saying that it is snowing) and his work landscaping on his property before the big cold hits. There are also some surprising scatological or cunnilingus references.
So, you have to slog through all these banal observations to get to the metaphysical poetry and memorable way with metaphors that Ammons was known for. There are maybe 5 poems here that I enjoyed and I will come back to, but Ammons was a bit of a jerk to make fans read through all this to get here.
The problem here is that this is really a diary, and an unexpurgated one. Ammons wrote whatever came to mind all winter, but then he did not trim any of what he had at the end, cutting out weaker material and leaving only the strong stuff. Instead, we get 292 pages of mainly weak stuff, where the insights to share and the impact on the reader are pretty few and far between.
Then, Ammons’ themes are pretty repetitive, centering around the temperature outside (so many poems start by noting how many degrees it is out, or saying that it is snowing) and his work landscaping on his property before the big cold hits. There are also some surprising scatological or cunnilingus references.
So, you have to slog through all these banal observations to get to the metaphysical poetry and memorable way with metaphors that Ammons was known for. There are maybe 5 poems here that I enjoyed and I will come back to, but Ammons was a bit of a jerk to make fans read through all this to get here.
October 8, 2024
Ammons' poems are always hit or miss for me, and this one contains far too many misses.
Firstly, he is less designing and more tinkering with the form of his poems. Sometimes, this turns out well like Tape for the Turn of the Year where the form forces extreme enjambment and creative shorthands. Other times, like in most of this collection, it is merely a gimmick whose novelty wears out after the first few pages (his overuse of twin columms comes to mind).
Secondly, the content of the poems is also wildly variant. His theme of the cyclical nature of life already wears thin by the end of Tape, and he has found no new insights since on the topic.
However, it must be not be denied that he has a strong grasp of the aural qualities of poetry, and many of his best poems in this collection is an absolutely joy to savour on the tongue. See: the opening stanza of Poetry is the Smallest.
Firstly, he is less designing and more tinkering with the form of his poems. Sometimes, this turns out well like Tape for the Turn of the Year where the form forces extreme enjambment and creative shorthands. Other times, like in most of this collection, it is merely a gimmick whose novelty wears out after the first few pages (his overuse of twin columms comes to mind).
Secondly, the content of the poems is also wildly variant. His theme of the cyclical nature of life already wears thin by the end of Tape, and he has found no new insights since on the topic.
However, it must be not be denied that he has a strong grasp of the aural qualities of poetry, and many of his best poems in this collection is an absolutely joy to savour on the tongue. See: the opening stanza of Poetry is the Smallest.
November 21, 2023
Published 1977, and its flavor really smacks of the 1970s. It feels odd (echoey?), the poet returning to his turning 50 then, when I was born not long off when the book was written and have stared 50 in the eyeball. The language play is wonderful, which is the thing I always say about Ammons. His writing feels intuitively close to my thought patterns, and so sends me down seemingly unconnected rabbit holes. I mean his language is close to my mental language. But holy crap, this book is not a compendium, it is 220+ pages of poems. It feels a bit overwhelming but I ask myself, how was that done? Could I do that? Of course, the way is to write.
July 1, 2017
Ammons is much less cerebral than I'd originally thought. Want to come back to 4 or 5 of these.
March 9, 2025
Mixed feelings about this one, but overall, I'm glad I read it. I describe a sample encounter with one of the poems here: https://zwieblein.bearblog.dev/anothe....
January 28, 2012
I guess you could say I read this, which is to say, skimmed. I love "Triphammer Bridge," but haven't loved in of Ammons' other poems so far. This one has a few cool/interesting/good poems in here, but not nearly what I'd hoped for based on the reviews I read.
December 28, 2007
I am mesmerized somehow by his snow poems, though I do not know why. Maybe it is the snow, but I think something much deeper than that.
April 1, 2016
loved the way he plays with formatting, though i didn't find his work to be as consistently engaging as i expected to.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews