Nothing Stays Put

<b>An evocative portrait of the beloved and acclaimed poet whose late-in-life success took the literary world by storm.</b><br><b><br><b>&#147;Clampitt comes to life here...Spiegelman&#146;s <i>Nothing Stays Put</i> embodies a different kind of investigation not surveillance but a thoughtful examination that at times still spins off into a kind of awe.&#148; &#151;<i>The Washington Post</i><br></b></b><br>With the publication of her first book of poems in her sixty-third year Amy Clampitt rose meteorically to fame launching herself from obscurity to the upper ranks of American poetry all but overnight and living a whirlwind eleven years until her death in 1994. Years later as renowned poetry scholar Willard Spiegelman wades into her papers and poems he discovers a woman of dazzling intellect staunch progressive politics and an inexhaustible sense of wonder for the world and the words we&#146;ve invented to describe it.<br><br>Giving equal weight to the life and the poetry Spiegelman untangles Clampitt&#146;s famously allusive lines to reveal the experiences they emerged from pulling the curtain back on her nearly four decades of artistic anonymity and in doing so assembling a rich period piece of Manhattan during the days in which Clampitt worked for Oxford University Press and the National Audubon Society&#151;writing cheery discursive office memos and two novels that never got published before hitting her stride in verse.<br><br><i>Nothing Stays Put</i> is a gift to poetry fans an inspiration to artists striving at any age and an ode to this most unlikely of literary celebrities who would publish five acclaimed books and win a MacArthur &#147;Genius Grant&#148; nearly all in the final decade of her life.