Briefings: Poems Small and Easy - Softcover

Ammons, A. R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393043266 ISBN 13: 9780393043266

Publisher: W. W. Norton, 1971

Synopsis

Briefings brings together more than eighty short lyrics that, as Harold Bloom writes, "maintain an utterly consistent purity of detached yet radiant vision." Bloom continues, "There are other American poets since Stevens who have composed a handful of memorable poems, but only Ammons has begun to show us a whole poetic world. More than his contemporaries, he has perfected a voice that, to cite Emerson, is 'ready to render an image of every created thing." David Kalstone says, "The poems are, by and large, tough or wry meditations, striking out into strange landscapes, dreams or nightmares, which are seen with entire clarity, no blurring, as if this were the only way the mind could be unwound on the page. The book forms a journal of mental states, each poem finding a form and a scene for a very exact mental encounter of discovery. . . . 'Small and Easy' is the way everything is finally made to seem, like the rarest dancing, in which briefly and freshly the dancer shows us what space is like by showing how much he can possess."

About this title

About the Author

A. R. Ammons’s (1926–2001) was a two-time winner of the National Book Award and the recipient of a National Book Critics Circle Award. His many additional honors include the Academy of American Poets’ Wallace Stevens Award, the Bollingen Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Robert Frost Medal, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations.

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton
• Publication date: 1971
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393043266
• ISBN 13: 9780393043266
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 126