An essential volume from “a master maker” (Richard Howard). “If you will sit with me in the light // of speech, I will sit with you. . . .” Readers who accept that invitation will find themselves in extraordinary company. The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons, Volume II presents the second half of Archie Randolph Ammons’s long career, including the complete texts of his two book-length poems from that period: Garbage, for which he won his second National Book Award, and Glare, which drew special praise from the Academy of American Poets as it bestowed on him its highest honor, the Wallace Stevens Award. In addition, two appendices offer over one hundred and twenty previously uncollected poems dating from the 1950s to the late 1990s. Among this volume’s many highlights are celebrations of the natural world (such as “Hermit Lark” and “Lofty Calling”), poems of remembrance (as in “Chinaberry” and “Keeping Track”), prayers (“Singling & Doubling Together” and “Autonomy”), and compelling meditations on loss and mortality (such as “Easter Morning” and “In View of the Fact”). As in Volume I, the variety of scale is remarkable, ranging from the massiveness of Glare to the haiku-like brevity of “Pebble’s Story.” The text of each poem has been established after careful consideration of Ammons’s manuscripts and other prepublication materials. Endnotes detail the poems’ composition and publication histories, and also helpfully annotate references made within the poems. Celebrated poetry critic Helen Vendler’s introduction both humanizes Ammons and traces the growth of his outsized stature as a major poet, “unquestionably among the best-loved poets of our time” (David Lehman).

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.

A reissue of a body of work spanning two decades from one of our most treasured poets. "It will seem increasingly to many attentive readers that this volume—the most distinguished book of American verse, in my judgment, since the publication of Wallace Stevens's Collected Poems in 1955—marks the permanent establishment of a major visionary poet."—Harold Bloom "No mere gathering of poems, this collection is like one an explorer brings back."—David Kalstone

"No contemporary poet, in America, is likelier to become a classic than A. R. Ammons."—Harold Bloom With characteristic economy, A. R. Ammons writes that "Brink Road lies off NY 96 between Candor and Catatonk." The very name suggests that we are ever in transition from one state of mind to another always on the edge of revelation. The more than 150 poems in Brink Road date from 1973 to the present, dealing with Ammons's concerns with language, mortality, and the forces underlying the natural world. With elegance, wit, and ruminative gravity, Brink Road is an important addition to one of the most enduring bodies of poetry of our time.

"No other contemporary poet, in America, is likelier to become a classic than A. R. Ammons."—Harold Bloom Bosh and Flapdoodle is A. R. Ammons's last completed collection of poetry. Written over a six-week period, the book offers a series of candid, alternately hilarious and heartbreaking ruminations on age, illness, and death, while still finding room for the poet's always penetrating observations of daily life and natural events.

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.

The Snow Poems is the most recent book of poetry by an author who has been called "perhaps the most imaginative, innovative poet writing today." Critics and readers alike recognize Ammons's achievements: in 1973, his Collected Poems won the National Book Award for Poetry; in 1975, his long poem Sphere: The Form of a Motion was nominated for the National Book Award and received the Bollingen Prize for Poetry: in 1977, he received and award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. The Snow Poems, Ammons's twelfth book, is a major achievement by a major American Poet.