Lake Effect Country

by A.R. Ammons

Presenting the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for 1981 to Ammons's A Coast of Trees Richard Locke, editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, said, in part: "In the thirty years since A. R. Ammons published his first poems, he has fashioned a body of work that achieves a rare amplitude, specific gravity, and high seriousness. He is a poet of the American Sublime a nature poet, as we say standing in the tradition of Wordsworth, Emerson, and Whitman. Amidst the hue and cry of contemporary poetical factions, his work pursues its own integrity: clear, unblinking in its self-knowledge, remarkable for its radiant density of argument and feeling."

Genres: Poetry

60 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Archie 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.

Reviews

[Jen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book would be mid-late career for Ammons. He was not yet 60 when it was published. I was surprised to see a description on the cover referring to him as a "nature" poet. I had considered him one of the more densely philosophical types. As it turns out both are true. In this volume, he has poems of both types and I'd say he's at his best with poems that ride the line. If they tilt too far toward the abstract, I'm lost. Most of his poems in this volume are rather spare, which sometimes accentuates the abstractness of what he is viewing as though it's not quite coming into view or as though he is engaging in cubist fracturing. However, the lean poems do result in this 60-page volume being a fast read. To be honest, from past experience with this poet, I was expecting a more tedious pace. I marked several poems as worth re-reading. Overall, I was pleasantly surprised but not so enamored that I'll be seeking out more of his work. For a taste, check out his many poems at poetryfoundation.org. Here is a poem from this book from among their archives (it goes onto a second page, but again a fast read):
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetr...
It is one of my favorites that illustrates that fine line between reality and abstraction.

Here is another one called "Written Water":

I hope I will go through
a period of hunger
for immortality and be stated--
so that I can rise

at last from that death into communion with
things, the flowing free of
grave trenches in rain, the
indifferent and suitable toppling

of stones, the wiping out of
borders and prints, stains, inks;
so that I can abide the
rinse of change as the fountainhead's

coolest, freshest drink, the
immortality likeliest to last, the clarity
whose clarion no decay smuts,
change's pure arising in constant souls

[Janet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Retiring

I'll keep the brook watched,
the crinkles of light
between flow-stones
bundles into sheaves:

I'll sort the clouds into
categories between
the great names--
nimbostratus, cirrocumulus--

till so many fine distinctions
become clouds again;
I'll probably get the sun
up and down, turn

the starts through the round
sprinkling sheets, become essential
at all the wind's swerves,
keep it going right.

[Wayne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some memorable nature imagery, though the rhythm seemed discordant. Interested to read other Ammons collections. Underwhelmed...

[Sam · Rating 1 out of 5]

garbled word mush

[Sarah Lada · Rating 2 out of 5]

I just finished reading "Lake Effect Country". It wasn't too memorable except that it seemed to have a small, in-passing conversation with Margaret Atwood's book of poetry "True Stories" (which oddly, I finished reading this morning). I only enjoyed a child's handful of the poems and strangely they were clustered together within the 48 poems in his book. I've had a long, rough week and I have been receiving small, discreet messages throughout. I kept hearing the word "whirlwind" which was then repeated in this book to my weary surprise. And Atwood had a great line:

"The only way is through..."

Sound advice to get through a taxing week. And especially enjoyable to revisit in Ammons' similar line:

"The only way around is through."

Thank you, words.

Thank you, serendipity.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 A521L 1983