Review by Booklist Review
Veteran poet Ammons has been the recipient of numerous prestigious awards and has penned volume after volume of poems glowing with nature, wit, and wisdom. His newest book is the yin to the yang of his last, The Really Short Poems [BKL Ap 15 91], as it consists of one long poem, 100 pages of linked couplets. The subject is poetry; the subject is garbage. The theme is writing poetry and reading garbage; the theme is transformation of thought and feeling into words, of objects into trash. Ammons is struck by the mounded offerings of garbage in the landfills along Florida's I-95, and he's also bemused by his attraction to simplicity as he gets settled into his sixth decade and ponders the implications of retirement. So this marvelously loopy, sneakily cosmic, gruffly concrete, and humorously philosophical poem touches on everything from death to disposable diapers; flies, slime, and discards to memories of love and the meaningfulness of a lifetime's accumulations and eliminations. By discerning eloquence in garbage, Ammons finds rebirth in decay, grace in castoffs, and beauty in all that we sense. A masterly performance. ~--Donna Seaman
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This book-length poem is the second in Ammons's ( Sumerian Vistas ) prolific and distinguished career. In it, 18 sections of meditative free verse range through mortality, nature and our human place in it, as well as through the ordering circuits of poetry and art. At first Ammons declares, ``This is a scientific poem,'' but he means that the reality of our lives and our work is attuned to the natural world in ways measurable and mysterious, as science is to him. Actual garbage, then, is only the starting point he spins away from and returns to in his musings. It is poetry itself that can cast a spell and prevent death: ``I want to get / around to where I can say I'm glad I was here, / even if I must go.'' Sporadically, the writing here is very fine. Ammons is a master of the music inside the conversational; at times, his words take on the momentum of a fugue. But, as he himself reflects, the poet is occasionally unsure of his mission, goal, substance: ``I can hardly think / or think of hardly a thing to say.'' Although Garbage may strike some as too long, in it Ammons sings pure notes among the others that sound less so. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
