Westward

by Amy Clampitt

Poems deal with nature, migration, the West, wildflowers, travel, mortality, change, and the prairie

Genres: Poetry

105 pages, Hardcover

First published April 7, 1990

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

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clampitt understands the myth of Manifest Destiny. But it is not only the complicated history of westward expansion that she confronts, Clampitt wants to use the United States' history to understand the complicated issues around mortality. She was 70 when this book was published, and throughout she gives allusion to people aging. What does it mean to have traveled anywhere when there will always be death to make it all end.

[Madeline · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection snuck up on me, I'll admit. The first few poems were the sort of aggressively pastoral poetry that - because I am a shallow person, I guess - don't do much for me (except for Seamus Heaney's stuff). But Clampitt's poetry is dense in the best ways, allusive and complex, and a little slippery. It reminded me, ever so slightly, of Gerard Manley Hopkins' work: the language and themes coil around each other in the same ways. And like Hopkins, Clampitt is balancing between baroque and garish.

Paris Review Interview.

[Sydney Goggins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clampitt's poetry invokes place in a very unique way. Many of these poems use the mythos of westward expansion as a vehicle for conveying a more personal history, and the complicated emotions that define our lives. "My Cousin Muriel" opens with the "enthrallments and futilities" of Manhattan, then recalling the "farmhouse childhood" she shared with her cousin, "kerosene-lit and tatting-and-mahogany genteel." Indeed, she identifies the East Coast with "vertiginous delusions of autonomy", and the West Coast with similar disappointment: in California, where her cousin moved in pursuit of a better life, "little is left, these days, these times, to say/ when the unspeakable stirs like a stone."

"The Prairie" is one of my favorite poems- Clampitt connects her grandfather's migration across the Great Plains, and eventually to California, with episodes from the life of Anton Chekhov. In the 19th century the steppes of central Russia were, like the American West at the same time, perceived as a new, largely 'empty' territory needing to be settled, a place of opportunity that could also be disconcerting in its loneliness. Clampitt develops this parallel quite masterfully throughout the poem.
Place becomes a source of inspiration but also a source of unease, as she seeks connections with her family's history:
"To be landless, half a nomad, nowhere wholly
at home, is to discover, now, an epic theme
in going back. The rootless urge that took
my father's father to Dakota, to California,
impels me there. A settled continent: what
does it mean?"

[Manny Arocho · Rating 3 out of 5]

Autographed copy by the poet

[Mills College Library]

811.54 C586w 1990

[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:
“Deleted Passage”
“Grasses”
“A Winter Burial”
“Nothing Stays Put”
“The Prairie”