Especially on the East Coast, Amy Clampitt has been widely hailed as the latest wonder woman of contemporary poetry. Perhaps most notably, Helen Vendler enthusiastically commended this writer's first volume, The Kingfisher, for the variety, the complexity, and, indeed, the difficulty of its vocabulary, but more recently—and more extravagantly—Mona Van Duyn (on the cover of What the Light Was Like) has characterized Clampitt as the offspring of a fantasy marriage between Marianne Moore and Gerard Manley Hopkins. The phenomenon represented by this suddenly made and meteorically ascending reputation is an interesting one, suggesting that some readers are almost desperately nostalgic for the good old pre-"Beat," pre-"Deep Image," pre-"Confessional" days when poems were well wrought urns, poets' personalities were (as T. S. Eliot had recommended) decorously "extinguished," and teachers of verse were priestly interpreters who fostered "appreciation" by urging students to "explicate" tough allusions, hard words, and intricate stanza patterns.

For Amy Clampitt's work wears both learning and linguistic craftsmanship like academic insignia—fancy hoods and stripes on a doctoral gown, certifying aesthetic achievement by openly affiliating individual talent to the increasingly imperilled high cultural tradition for which so many intellectuals lately find themselves yearning. Through overt or covert allusions to texts by Homer, Sappho, Virgil, Petrarch, George Eliot, John Keats, William Butler Yeats, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens—and to many another monument of unaging intellect—Clampitt demonstrates that Western Civ. still lives and sophomore survey courses can pay off for reader and writer alike. Similarly, through her affinity for sonnets and sestinas, complex stanza patterns and elegant half-rhymes, she proves that verse-writing might actually be a teachable (and traditional) skill whose rules transcend the vagaries and mysteries of "breath units," "organic" forms, and "concrete" compositions.

That Clampitt's special interests tend to assuage a number of specialized anxieties does not, of course, mean that this poet lacks talent. Besides its skillful, sometimes even brilliant exploitation of old-fashioned resources of rhyme and meter whose time for revival has at last arrived, the verse in What the Light Was Like is often marked by the inventive urbanity one associates with Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop in their more relaxed moments. In "Gooseberry Fool," for instance, she observes that

while in "Low Tide at Schoodic" she notes how "a warbler … all nerves turned to / alarums, dapper in a yellow domino, / a noose of dark about his throat, / appends his anxious signature" to the granite sea-edge, "the planar windowpanes of tidepools." When she writes directly about childhood memories, moreover, Clampitt often achieves real dramatic power. Though the elegiac "Black Buttercups," for instance, is (to my mind) marred by some of the characteristics that have become this writer's "hallmarks"—classical allusion (a pond that is "the Acheron / of dreadful disappointed Eros"), unabashedly "poetic" phrasing ("lucent chalices")—it vividly elegizes the lost house of childhood "where even now / the child who wept to leave still sits / weeping at the thought of exile."

Nevertheless, much of the work in What the Light Was Like is for the most part too tediously—and easily—literary. Yes, if you took Poetry 101 at any decent university you'll guess the references: "An ordinary evening in Wisconsin," "Something there is that doesn't / love a Third Avenue tenement," and "Much having traveled in the funkier realms of Ac- / ademe" are only a few of the more obvious ones. But if you didn't get an A in the course and can't find the others for yourself, the author is only too willing to help you out with footnotes which, unlike Marianne Moore's arcane and cryptic citations, explain the obvious with self-congratulatory fervor. About a clever sestina entitled "The Reedbeds of the Hackensack," for example, Clampitt pontificates that "Allusions to and / or borrowings from the poems of William Carlos Williams, Dante, Milton, Keats, and Shakespeare will be noted in this poem, which may be regarded as a last-ditch [note the pun] effort to associate the landscape familiarly known as the Jersey Meadows with the tradition of elegiac poetry," while a witty occasional poem called "A Cure at Porlock" comes tout ensemble with a Norton-Anthology-style footnote to Coleridge's famously interrupted opium dream.

Most depressingly—and vapidly—"literary," however, is the sequence entitled Voyages: A Homage to John Keats, which functions as a kind of centerpiece for this volume and which is, appropriately enough, dedicated to the Clampitt enthusiast and Keats scholar Helen Vendler. Alas, this Hollywood version of a great and greatly moving life ought more properly to have been labelled The John Keats Story or maybe just Keats! (though the latter would probably be the right title for the musical comedy avatar). To give the unwary Keats lover an idea of what I mean: when the young poet decides to write "The Eve of St. Agnes," Clampitt recounts his feelings thus:

He must have whistled at the notion that struck
him now. And then blushed. Or vice versa. A
girl going to bed on St. Agnes' Eve—that very
night, or near it—without supper, so as to
dream of the man she was to marry. Imagine
her. Imagine…. He blushed now at the
audacity. But the thing had taken hold:
St. Agnes' Eve. A girl going to bed….

And when the pained artist suddenly and poignantly gains confidence, Clampitt describes the experience as follows:

There are some wonderful moments in What the Light Was Like but it would be better for Amy Clampitt if, at least for a while, she tucked her notes from Poetry 101 away in a trunk. There, I've said it.