Winner of the National Book Award.

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."

"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."

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.

Ammons's poetic genius has always been at home in forms ranging from brief lyrics to longer works. In the present volume—the first since his highly acclaimed Lake Effect Country—readers will find superb examples of work in both forms. "The Ridge Farm," which begins the book, and "Tombstones," at its center, are fine longer meditations, while "Motion's Holdings," the concluding section, contains a number of his best new shorter poems. The book is proof, once again, that Ammons is one of our major American poets.

Forcefully demonstrating that brevity is the soul of wit, 160 short poems, spanning the career of one of America's most honored poets, range from mordantly funny paradoxes to compressed incidents of lyric perception

Schneider presents new and penetrating readings of Ammons's central poems, such as "Corsons Inlet," Sphere, and "Easter Morning.".