SOURCE: "Interior and Exterior Worlds," in The Nation, New York, Vol. 204, No. 17, April 24, 1967, pp. 541-42.

[Logan is an American poet and critic whose verse is generally regarded as intense and personal as well as distinctly humanist in its central concern with humankind and its potential. He has served as the poetry editor of both the Nation and the Critic and is also the founder and coeditor of Choice, a magazine of poetry and graphics. In the following review of Northfield Poems, Logan comments on the relationship between the external world and the poet's internal life, as they are depicted in Ammons's early poetry. Logan concludes by declaring Ammons "a major talent."]

A. R. Ammons is one of the most prolific and, at the same time, most intelligent gifted poets of recent years. North-field Poems is his third book to appear in two years—with Corsons Inlet and Tape for the Turn of the Year— and there were two others in the previous ten-year period; Ommateum (which was privately printed) and Expressions of Sea Level.

Tape for the Turn of the Year, perhaps the most interesting single volume, is a continuing poem, mainly unrevised, which Ammons composed by inserting one end of an adding machine tape in a typewriter and proceeding to the other end. The imposed limitation of form apparently provided a pressure which helped to produce some very beautiful writing, all 200 pages of it in the mode of a journal extending over a period of about a month. The long, thin poem is occasionally ascetic in its effect (as an El Greco figure) and again it is snakelike. There is a passage where the poem shows a striking self-recognition of its phallic character:

If I had a flute: wdn't
it be fine
to see this long thin
poem rise out of the waste-
basket:
the charmed erection,
stiffening, uncoiling?

Another passage catches from inside the work, toward its end, the speaker's sense of his own utterance:

I wrote about these
days the way life gave them:
I didn't know
beforehand what I
wd write, whether I'd meet
anything new: I
showed that I'm sometimes
blank and abstract,
sometimes blessed with song: sometimes
silly, vapid, serious,
angry, despairing.

The free form of the poem (despite its strict limitation on line length) and its willingness to risk "prose" and looser diction, has given it an utterly original tone, a curious blend of confession, lyricism and observation of two kinds—the strikingly concrete and the near abstract.

All three of these qualities recur in other books though there is less of the first—indeed less personal portraiture of any direct kind—in Ommateum. Confession begins with Expressions of Sea Level where, combined with childhood reminiscence as in "Nelly Myers" and "Silver" it has given us some of the most beautiful poems of our time:

I will not end my grief, earth will
not end my grief,
I move on,
we move on, some scraps of us together,
my broken soul leaning toward her to be touched,
listening to be healed.

A number of poems in Expressions, Corsons Inlet and Northfield, as the names of the latter two hint, are based on experiences of places in South Jersey—where Mr. Ammons was for many years an executive in a chemical glass factory before turning to teaching.

Ammons' voice is unique and would not fail to be recognized even in the first book:

So I said I am Ezra
and the wind whipped my throat
gaming for the sounds of my voice
I listened to the wind
go over my head and up into the night.

There is a return to the oracular, Old Testament-like persona of "Ezra" in the poem "The Wind Coining Down From" in the present volume. The poems of this book reiterate several motifs we are familiar with from the others, and they range from the highly abstract game-stance of "The Numbers":

be confident;
as you turn to the numbers
veracity
links segment to segment: a sausage bliss!

through the lecture-like sound of "The Motions" to the Biblical incantation of "Joshua Tree" on the one hand or the very direct, sure, imitative dialect of "First Carolina Said Song" on the other:

We got there just in time to see her buried
in an oak grove up
back of the field:
its growed over with soapbushes and huckleberries now.

"Joshua Tree" is a moving piece in which the speaker relates to the wind, who instructs him to

settle here
by this Joshua Tree
and make a well.

The speaker, after lamenting that he is

consigned to
form that will not
let me loose
except to death

so that he "must go on" until then, asks that later the wind—muse-like and yet like a man—

enter angling through
my cage
and let my ribs
sing me out.

The wind is a frequent persona in the poems, as breath itself becomes fleshed out. Considering wind as breath one begins to see the connection between the poems of external landscape and the elements (which fill the first book and reappear here) and the poems of internal geography.

When I go back of my head
down the cervical well, roots
branch
turning, figuring
into flesh.

I don't like the line "meat's indivisible stuff" because its texture jars with the rest of the coulage of diction, but otherwise this poem, "Landscape with Figures," is one of the strongest in the collection.

There is a constant playing off of the interior world of mind and cells against the exterior world of things where self lies dispersed and in need of the gathering force of a poem. The rapport of interior and exterior is itself expressed in a perfect short poem entitled "Reflective," which I give here entire:

I found a
weed
that had a

mirror in it
and that
mirror

looked in at
a mirror
in

me that
had a
weed in it.

The half-solipsistic character of this is projected beautifully to trees in a fuller sense in the poem "Halfway":

birches stand
in

pools of them-
selves, the yellow
fallen

leaves reflecting
those on
the tree that
mirror the ground

From the idea of external—reflected—in—internal, one can move rather easily to the notion of the cosmos reflected in small in one of its parts, as in the striking poem. "The Constant," where the galaxy-like, moving film of sand in the water of a clam shell seems to reflect the scope of sky, so that:

a gull's toe could spill the universe:
two more hours of sun could dry it up;
a higher wind could rock it out….

There is a marvelous imaging of the tentativeness with which things "live and move and have their being" as the Old Fellow said. This mood is seconded in "Contingency" where, contemplating all the life and change started by a sprinkler, one reflects that:

a turn of the faucet
dries every motion up.

And it is brought into a new key in the poem, "Zone," which suggests that a myth of creation is completed only by its parallel myth of uncreation. There is a constant need for recovery, whether for the shadows of trees (in "Recovery") or for time future (in "Passage")—

tomorrow emerges and
falls back shaped into today: endlessly

—or for the life of a man himself. For poets this latter kind of recovery is accomplished by the writing of poems, and when the poems are as good as these, it is sometimes accomplished for others by reading them.

Intellectuality is a prime trait of Ammons' work, as is suggested by the abstract character of several titles in the new book: "Height," "Reflective," "Contingency," "Interference," "Saliences." Sometimes, as in the latter poem and in "One-Many"—two of the most ambitious and strongest poems in the book—there is too much cerebration demanded of the reader, I believe, before the poem begins to burgeon. There are some other faults. Occasionally the poems seem to lack vigor. Occasionally influence obtrudes itself, as that of Marianne Moore in "Uh, Philosophy" or of Dylan Thomas in these punning, elegiac lines:

If bleak through the black night
we could outrun
this knowledge into a different morning!

or of T. S. Eliot in this passage: "though the world ends and cannot end" and "To death, the diffuse one going beside me, I said…." (Yet the most pervasive influences—those of William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound—have been well assimilated to form a highly original body of work.) There are occasional bad lines: "O ablutions!" Yet, a careful look at the whole body of Ammons' work, particularly Tape for the Turn of the Year and the new book, will show that we are dealing with a major talent, one who has the courage and the heuristic power to discover new form, as well as the eye and the ear and the mind to hold us and to give us what Thomas called "the momentary peace of the poem."