Brink Road

by A. R. Ammons

Overview

"No contemporary poet, in America, is likelier to become a classic than A. R. Ammons."—Harold Bloom

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393315974
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	08/17/1997
Edition description:	Revised ed.
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.70(d)
Lexile:	1260L (what's this?)

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.

Editorial Reviews

At the end of Brink Road is "Summer Place," a 45-page piece written in narrative triplets. While the jacket copy, like a warning sign, declares that this poem "unfolds the quotidian events of the poet's summer vacation," there is, fortunately, enough humor and sarcasm to make it fun. When this cranky and multiple award-winning poet/professor finds himself with nothing to do during a long July, he turns to self-effacement, colleague bashing ("John Hollander who knows so much about the art of/ poetry you wouldn't understand a thing he said") and undelighted, lecherous observations ("...coeds with the pear-like rondure/ sloping the dinky-little bicycle seats/ wouldn't it be fun to be leather...). The real problem with Ammons's latest trek is the 152 shorter works that line the way to "Summer Place." Often minimalist and obsessed with paradox, these poems are skeletons, their lines stacked like vertebrae ("where then do I/ belong: your/ belonging/ is to belong nowhere:/ what am I/ to be") or ribs of pastoral wonderment ("A shaded branch will through etiolation stretch, even though it has/ little sun to stretch with, to get into the sun").They tease the brain but rarely engage the heart. (July)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Two books, one new, reflecting Ammons's "trademark minimal verse" (LJ 9/1/96).

Library Journal