Lake Effect Country

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 Sublimea nature poet as we saystanding 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.