Ah, lovely, especially the second poem. I love '...the aloof skin tones / Of a Crivelli angel....' , so muted and austere. It gives me hope, she started so much later than I did.
Jane
Vivek Narayanan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On the metro to work, I've been reading Amy Clampitt's second
collection, What the Light Was Like. Clampitt was an intense poet who
published five collections, her first one at the age of 63 (
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/44 ) Tasty, very tasty, but not
afraid to be cerebral, not at all. Shades of Marianne Moore. I type
below two poems from that collection.
(About linebreaks, btw: I have a friend who has a nice trick. He
keeps a paper below each line as he reads a poem, so he can see the
line by itself and try to guess how the next one will turn. It's a
good way to learn the integrity of the line, to see the strength of a
line by itself, and I've adopted the practice myself. It works
remarkably with Clampitt's poems-- of course you'd have to print out
the poem first...)
WITNESS
An ordinary evening in Wisconsin
seen from a Greyhound bus--mute aisles
of merchandise the sole inhabitants
of the half-darkened Five and Ten,
the tables of the single lit cafe awash
with unarticulated pathos, the surface membrane
of the inadvertently transparent instant
when no one is looking: outside town
the barns, their red gone dark with sundown,
withhold the shudder of a warped terrain--
the castle rocks above, tree-clogged ravines
already submarine with nightfall, flocks
(like dark sheep) of toehold junipers,
the lucent arms of birches : purity
without a mirror, other than a mind bound
elsewhere, to tell how it looks.
A BAROQUE SUNBURST
struck through such a dome
as might await a groaning Michelangelo,
finding only alders and barnacles
and herring gulls at their usual squabbles,
sheds on the cove's voluted
silver the aloof skin tones
of a Crivelli angel: a region,
a weather and a point of view
as yet unsettled, save for the lighthouse
like a Venetian campanile, from whose nightlong
reflected angelus you might suppose
the coast of Maine had Europe
on the brain or in its bones, as though
it were a kind of sickness.
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