Volume 22, Number 3 · March 6, 1975
Cards of Identity
By Donald Davie
Sphere: The Form of a Motion
by A.R. Ammons
Norton, 79 pp., $1.95 (paper)
High Island
by Richard Murphy
Harper and Row, 118 pp., $2.95 (paper)
Poems 4
by Alan Dugan
Atlantic-Little, Brown, 58 pp., $2.95 (paper)
I am way behind, getting to A.R. Ammons only now. And I know why; everything I ever heard about him said that he wasn't my cup of tea. (The Britishness of that idiom is much to the point.) He was, I gathered, a poet who said 'Ooh' and 'Ah' to the universe, who had oceanic feelings about the multiplicity of things in nature, and the ubiquity of nature's changes; a poet enamoured of flux, therefore; and so, necessarily, a practitioner of 'open form'—which last comes uncomfortably close for my taste to being a contradiction in terms. In short, he was one whom Harold Bloom had applauded as 'a major visionary poet'; and if that doesn't raise my hackles exactly, it certainly gives me goose-pimples.
Review, 2652 words
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