Briefings

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.