Poetry Readers Challenge discussion

Earlier this month while looking for odds and ends to round out my family gift-giving, I came across this book at the local what-not warehouse. It's copyrighted 1983. I recognized the poet's name and thought, "why not," even though I have never felt drawn to poetry of his that I've come across in anthologies.

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