A.R. Ammons's new selection of his work once again, as the critic Harold Bloom wrote of the earlier edition, 'makes available the very best of him.' To the 'visions of clarity and terror' in that volume the poet now adds the most important poems from his three books published since. The resulting collection is the essential starting place for new readers, the quarry for those familiar with his work. Among the new poems is 'Easter Morning.' which the critic Helen Vendler called 'a classic poem, a revelation.

A collection of over sixty-eight poems by American poet A.R. Ammons in which he makes observations of the natural world and speculates about philosophical topics.

Readers already familiar with Ammons’s longer mode in other books will welcome this new collection, while those familiar only with the shorter poems will find their appreciation of his work both deepened and heightened. The Selected Poems: 1951-1977 was described by one critic as “an indispensable book”; Selected Longer Poems is an indispensable companion to it. The distinguished poet A. R. Ammons once described himself as, “not so much looking for the shape as being available to any shape that may be summoning itself through me from the self not mine but ours.” This “availability” has enabled his poetic genius to be at home in forms raging from brief lyrics—the best of which he brought together in The Selected Poems: 1951-1977—all the way to poems of full book length.

This collection of shorter poems won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1981. Of this volume, the noted critic Harold Bloom has written, "A Coast of Trees represents A. R. Ammons at his strongest and most eloquent in the lyric mode. The book is an achievement fully comparable to his Uplands and Briefings. Among the poems likely to assume a permanent place in the Ammonsian (and American) canon are the majestic title lyric and 'Swells,' 'Easter Morning,' 'Keepsake,' 'Givings,' and 'Persistences.' Again Ammons has confirmed his vital continuities with the central Whitmanian tradition of our poetry, and his crucial place in that panoply."

I reject the North because it is not / my native ground, and I reject the / South because it rejected me, and I / reject European clutterment because / we fought to put that ocean between / us. I identify with no sort or kind: / I am by myself.

More than eighty works by the innovative contemporary poet includes Expressions of Sea Level, The Arc Inside and Out, Delaware Water Gap, and In the Wind My Rescue Is

"A. R. Ammons has exploded into the company of American poets that includes Whitman and Emerson and articulates the major impulse of the national expression: the paradox of poetry as process and yet impediment to process."