Works by
A. R. Ammons
(Aka Archie Randolph Ammons)
(Poet)
[February 18, 1926 – February 25, 2001]

As Editor

• The Best American Poetry 1994 (1994), David Lehman and A. R. Ammons, eds.

Poetry

• Bosh and Flapdoodle: Poems (2006)
  Bosh and Flapdoodle is A. R. Ammons's last completed collection of poetry. Written over a six-week period, the book offers a series of candid, alternately hilarious and heartbreaking ruminations on age, illness, and death, while still finding room for the poet's always penetrating observations of daily life and natural events.

• A. R. Ammons: Selected Poems (2006), David Lehman, ed.
  Meditative, comic, emotionally wrenching, steeped in both the natural world and the life of the mind, the poetry of A. R. Ammons is at once cosmic in scope and intimate in its moment-to-moment transformations. With his mastery of description and cadence, his roiling wit and fearless gaze, Ammons was a philosopher of the everyday who found surprise everywhere he looked. "He is often witty, sometimes bawdy," writes editor David Lehman, "on a perpetual quest to find forms capacious enough for an imagination intent on finding a place for everything."
  
  A compound, in editor David Lehman's words, of "wisdom, pathos, humor, mortal longing, and intimations of immortality," the work of A. R. Ammons is like nothing else in modern American poetry. Ammons's tireless formal invention and restless curiosity about every aspect of nature and of the mind are embodied in poetry that is effortlessly accessible and generous in its impulses. Whether spreading out in the long forms of Tape for the Turn of the Year or Garbage, or honing his perceptions down to the extreme brevity of his shorter lyrics, he holds tight to his vision of the way "all day / life itself is bending, / weaving, changing, / adapting, failing, / succeeding."
  
  This new selection covering the whole range of Ammons's career offers a superb introduction to the pleasures and surprises of his work. His uncanny ability to balance wide-ranging abstract speculation with meticulous observation of natural phenomena, in poetry that encompasses moods of tragic pathos, low comedy, and seemingly casual profundity marks him as one of the preeminent figures in our recent literature.

• Collected Poems 1951-1971 (2001)
  A reissue of a body of work spanning two decades from one of our most treasured poets.

• Glare (1997)
  A superb long poem by the contemporary master of the form, Glare comprises two sections, "Strip" and "Scat Scan." The poem demonstrates, yet again, why National Book Award-winning author A. R. Ammons's poetic voice is a national treasure: by turns cosmic, self-inflating, self-deflating, eloquent, intimate, bawdy, comic, precise--and always unmistakably his own.

• Brink Road (1996)
  With characteristic economy, A. R. Ammons writes that "Brink Road lies off NY 96 between Candor and Catatonk." The very name suggests that we are ever in transition from one state of mind to another always on the edge of revelation. The more than 150 poems in Brink Road date from 1973 to the present, dealing with Ammons's concerns with language, mortality, and the forces underlying the natural world. With elegance, wit, and ruminative gravity, Brink Road is an important addition to one of the most enduring bodies of poetry of our time. It is his first collection of new work since Sumerian Vistas (1987).

• The North Carolina Poems (1994), Alex Albright, ed.

• Garbage (1993) -- Winner 1993 National Book Award, Winner 1993 Library of Congress Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry

• The Really Short Poems (1991)

• Sumerian Vistas (1987)
  In the present volume—the first since his highly acclaimed Lake Effect Country—readers will find superb examples of work in both forms. "The Ridge Farm," which begins the book, and "Tombstones," at its center, are fine longer meditations, while "Motion's Holdings," the concluding section, contains a number of his best new shorter poems. The book is proof, once again, that Ammons is one of our major American poets.

• The Selected Poems: Expanded Edition (1986)
  To the "visions of clarity and terror" in that volume the poet now adds the most important poems from his three books published since. The resulting collection is the essential starting place for new readers, the quarry for those familiar with his work. Among the new poems is "Easter Morning," which the critic Helen Vendler called "a classic poem . . . a revelation." .

• Lake Effect Country (1983)
  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."

• Worldly Hopes (1982)
  In the poetry of A. R. Ammons, Helen Vendler has written, "the scientific world is beautifully in balance with the perceptual one." Originally published in 1982, this collection reminds us why Ammons must be read by all those who would understand our age and one of its most brilliant voices.

• A Coast of Trees (1981) -- Winner 1981 National Book Critics Circle Award
  Of this volume, the noted critic Harold Bloom has written, "A Coast of Trees represents A. R. Ammons at his strongest and most eloquent in the lyric mode. The book is an achievement fully comparable to his Uplands and Briefings. Among the poems likely to assume a permanent place in the Ammonsian (and American) canon are the majestic title lyric and 'Swells,' 'Easter Morning,' 'Keepsake,' 'Givings,' and 'Persistences.' Again Ammons has confirmed his vital continuities with the central Whitmanian tradition of our poetry, and his crucial place in that panoply."

• Selected Longer Poems (1980)

• Highgate Road (1977)

• The Selected Poems: 1951-1977 (1977)

• The Snow Poems (1977)

• Diversifications (1975)
  Diversifications is a collection of shorter poems by the poet whose Collected Poems won the National Book Award . The poems are on a diversity of subjects, but through them all runs the strong unity of vision that has led critic Geoffrey Hartman to acclaim Ammons as "a major American poet" (New York Times Book Review).
  
  Ammons came late to poetry, and has come even more lately into national recognition. That recognition is solid, however, and can only be increased by this, his latest volume.

• Sphere: The Form of a Motion (1974) -- Winner 1971 Bollingen Prize
  Sphere is the second of A. R. Ammons's long poems—following Tape for the Turn of the Year and preceding Garbage—that mark him as a master of this particular form. The sphere in question is the earth itself, and Ammons's wonderfully stocked mind roams globally, ruminating on subjects that range from galaxies to gas stations. It is a remarkable achievement, comparable in importance to Wallace Stevens's Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.

• Collected Poems: 1951-1971 (1972) -- Winner 1973 National Book Award

• Briefings: Poems Small and Easy (1971)

• Uplands (1970)
  This book collects many of the poems that A. R. Ammons wrote between 1964 and 1970. The poems here include brief lyrics and such longer works as "Summer Session 1968" and "Guitar Recicativos."

• Selected Poems (1968)

• Northfield Poems (1966)

• Corsons Inlet (1965, 1967)
  Corson's Inlet is A. R. Ammons's third book of poems. Consisting of some of his best early work, including such strikingly inventive poems as "Jungle Knot," "Coon Song," "Four Motions for the Pea Vines," and the title piece, this volume provides incontestable evidence of Ammons's rapid early growth as a poet, of his ever-broadening range and deepening perception. Corsons Inlet, like Ammons's Tape for the Turn of the Year, shows clearly his remarkable originality—and, more important, his lavish and unique poetic gifts.

• Tape for the Turn of the Year (1965, 1972)
  This poem takes the form of a month-long journal, composed on a roll of adding machine tape.

• Expressions of Sea Level (1964)

• Ommateum, with Doxology (1955)

Prose

• Set in Motion: Essays, Interviews, and Dialogues (1996) with Zofia Burr, ed.
  Set in Motion collects for the first time the prose writings of A. R. Ammons, one of our most important and enduring contemporary poets. Hailed as a major force in American poetry by such redoubtable critics as Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler, Ammons has reflected upon the influences of luminaries like Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Frost, Stevens, and Williams while creating a compelling style and an artistic vision uniquely his own.
  
  Set in Motion includes essays, reviews, and interviews as well as a selection of Ammons's poems, with commentary from the author about their inspiration and effects. He takes up the questions that have been central to American poetry over the last forty years and connects them to the larger enterprise of living in a difficult, changing world. At a moment when the arts are under attack, Ammons reminds us of the crucial role poetry plays in teaching us to recognize and use sources of understanding that are irreducible to statement.

See also:

• Biography - A. R. Ammons (2007)
  An article from: Contemporary Authors Online by Gale Reference Team, Digital - HTML

• Considering the Radiance: Essays on the Poetry Of A. R. Ammons ( 2005) by Roger Gilbert and David Burak
  Addressing every phase of A. R. Ammons's oeuvre, from his beginnings in the 1950s to his late masterpieces Garbage and Glare, this collection explores the personal side of a poet often still seen as forbiddingly abstract and intellectual. Included are essays by Helen Vendler, Alice Fulton, Harold Bloom, and John Ashbery, among others.