[Vendler is regarded by many as one of America's foremost critics of poetry. Since the mid-1960s she has contributed reviews and articles on poetry to prominent literary publications, in particular the New York Times Book Review, and since 1978 has served as poetry critic for the New Yorker. In addition to her reviews and articles, Vendler is the author of acclaimed book-length studies of poets W. B. Yeats, George Herbert, Wallace Stevens, and John Keats. Her most noted work, the award-winning collection of criticism Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets (1980), is recognized as a thorough and informed view of contemporary American poetry. In the following review, Vendler offers an enthusiastic appraisal of Ammons 's A Coast of Trees and states: "Ammons's own newness … lies in his finely calibrated sense of the actual, non-transcendent motions of the natural world."]

A classic poem, when it appears, comes not as a surprise but as a confirmation:

I have a life that did not become,
that turned aside and stopped,
astonished:
I hold it in me like a pregnancy or
as on my lap a child
not to grow or grow old but dwell on
it is to his grave I most
frequently return
and return to ask what is wrong, what was
wrong, to see it all by
the light of a different necessity
but the grave will not heal
and the child,
stirring, must share my grave
with me, an old man having
gotten by on what was left

This is the beginning of A. R. Ammons's revelatory poem, "Easter Morning." The central sentiment is not altogether unprecedented—Robert Lowell said, "Always inside me is the child who died"—but Lowell was speaking of a younger self continuous in some way with his adult self ("Always inside me is his wish to die"). Ammons is talking about a self that stopped, that never became, that is buried in a grave that does not heal. And yet that self is not dead; it is a "child, stirring." Robert Frost talked, more distantly, of a road not taken in the past; Ammons's metaphor of the child—buried, or in a womb, or on a lap—is alive with pain and quick with dismay. Ammons's lines rivet us where we stand and we find ourselves uttering them as though our own life had suddenly found its outlet-speech: "I have a life that did not become … the grave will not heal." Ammons's arrow strikes straight to the heart, and to the unhealed grave in it. "How did you know," we ask Ammons, "when we didn't know, ourselves, till you told us?" This is a poetry of eerie power, dependent not so much on the particular circumstances of Ammons's life as on his unsettling skill as an allegorist. Anything he tells us about his life ("I have a life that did not become") turns out to be true of everyone: he is a poet of the universal human condition, not of particular idiosyncrasy. This great poem, "Easter Morning," turns out to be about the damage which every child undergoes as members of his family—a sibling, an aunt, a grandparent—die. It is an elegy in a family churchyard. When Ammons now goes back to North Carolina, the relatives he knew are dead:

When I go back to my home country in these
fresh far-away days, it's convenient to visit
everybody, aunts and uncles, those who used to say,
look how he's shooting up, and the
trinket aunts who always had a little
something in their pocketbooks….

The catalog goes on to include uncles and teachers and Ammons's mother and father—all in the churchyard, dead, their world gone. And Ammons remembers himself as a child, shocked and blighted and deflected out of ordinary growth by these deaths:

the child in me that could not become
was not ready for others to go,
to go on into change, blessings and
horrors, but stands there by the road
where the mishap occurred, crying out for
help, come and fix this or we
can't get by, but the great ones who
were to return, they could not or did
not hear and went on in a flurry and
now, I say in the graveyard, here
lies the flurry, now it can't come
back with help or helpful asides, now
we all bury the bitter incompletions.

In the desolate market of experience where none come to buy (as Blake said) Ammons stands, with his uncanny plainness of speech, the lines running on like an explanation and an apology atonce, heedless and pell-mell, every so often stopped by a pulling-up short, a bewilderment, an obstacle, an arrest in emotion:

I stand on the stump
of a child, whether myself
or my little brother who died, and
yell as far as I can, I cannot leave this place, for
for me it is the dearest and the worst
it is life nearest to life which is
life lost: it is my place where
I must stand and fail.

I am not sure whether the strange and complex resolution of the poem (in which Ammons watches the flight of eagles, and is grateful for perennial natural patterns and fresh insights alike) serves to resurrect the dead on this "picture-book, letter-perfect/ Easter morning." And I wonder whether the long anguish of the poem can be excerpted at all. But to review A Coast of Trees is first of all to give notice of the existence of "Easter Morning" as a new treasure in American poetry, combining the blankest of losses with the fullest of visions. It is a poem which should be published all alone, in a three-page book by itself; it is so complete it repels company.

Nevertheless, it has company, and distinguished company, in this new collection of short poems. Ammons always oscillates interestingly between the briefest of brief lyrics ("Briefings," "Uplands," etc.) and the longest of long poems ("Sphere," "Tape for the Turn of the Year") Ammons's bedrock is his conviction of the absolute interconnectedness of all phenomena. The atmosphere (so to speak) over his bedrock is formed by his quick, almost birdlike, noticing of all epiphenomena constantly occurring in the universe—a flight of moths here, a rill of snow-melt there. The short poems record the noticings; the long poems offer the metaphysics of multiple connection. Yet even this description is too divisive. Even in the short poems, Ammons's metaphysics of multiple connection is present in an abbreviated form, represented sometimes by syntax, sometimes by rhetorical figure (notably repetition of a word or a word-root in syntactically significant positions). For instance, Ammons writes about the difficulty of putting a name, or names to reality—and about the attendant paradox that the closer the approximation of the name to the event the more acutely one feels the frustrating gap between what has been achieved and what absolute fidelity to reality would be. Using his favorite dense repetition, he grieves, "… the name nearest the name/ names least or names/ only a verge before the void takes naming in."

The sound of the writing verges on riddle, and hovers near theological paradox, but the sentiment is neither a riddle nor a mystification. It is a precise denomination in a series of self-joining words: "the name nearest the name names least or names only…." This statement of a divergence takes on itself semantically the form of an obsessive connection. And though the creation of the formal barrier of art excludes "reality," it is surely a wonderful mutual relation that makes the terrain of the excluded ("cast out") equal exactly, as a two-piece verb, the terrain of the included ("shut in"): "when the fences foregather/ the reality they shut in is cast out." Almost every statement of fear or loss in Ammons occurs in a line that paradoxically consolidates a strict, practical linguistic gain—often as simple a gain as a word humming in resonance with another word, or a triumphant conclusion to a long syntactical suspension. The suspended syntax arises from Ammons's inexhaustible wish to explain; he is the poet par excellence of the bifurcating line of argument, a line that is interspersed with "I suspect" or "well, maybe" or "in fact" or "after all" or "that is" or "probably" or a sequence of "but's." To that extent his poetry is the utterance of that endless rhetoric he calls "reason":

Reason can't end:
it is discourse, motion
to find motion, reason to
find reason to abandon reason

But against the straight "thruway" of reason Ammons sets another formal motive, which he calls "shape": shape wants to wind discourse up, to give it a rondure, a closure. The shapeliness—almost spherical—of so many of Ammons's short lyrics asserts that a moment or a mood has its own being to proclaim in a determinate form. If that form is violated, something else is produced—even another poem perhaps, but not the original one, which, in being amended, is forever gone. The shape of a poem is inviolate:

The rigidity of this verse defies us to shift a single word, to misplace a single "it" or "cast." The verse rejoices in its imperviousness to tinkering: it braces its "no" against its "any," its "free" against its "cast free," its "part" against "part," creating a wind-proof, storm-proof shelter against the inversions of chance. Ammons's loquacity of "reason" so plays against his geometry of "shape" that the exhilaration of the combat of the two motives equals in interest the plangent tales he tells of the life of the spirit.

These are twice-told tales; Ammons moves easily in the line of our poets. Like Traherne, he calls a poem "Poverty"; like Herbert, he sees a silk twist (in Ammons, "silk lines") coming down in radiance from heaven; like Keats, he stands (in the majestic poem called "Swells") on the shore of the wide world till love and fame sink to nothingness. Like Yeats, he feels the pull of the balloon of the mind (Yeats tried to tether it; Ammons says, "I have let all my balloons aloose"); like Emily Dickinson, he feels an affinity for that "neglected son of genius," the spider, working like the poet "airy with radiality"; like Oliver Wendell Holmes, he writes "An Improvisation for the Stately Dwelling"; like Williams and Hopkins, he offers perpetual praise of the world of sight. In Ammons these earlier poets have found the ideal reader—the reader who himself writes a new poem as a variation on the older one.

Ammons's own newness—it bears repeating—lies in his finely calibrated sense of the actual, non-transcendent motions of the natural world. He is not in a hurry, as most of his predecessors (Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, Hopkins) have been, to move from natural fact to patriotic or religious or philosophical enthusiasm. Ammons is true to himself in ending "Easter Morning" with the natural fact of bird-instinct, seen in a new configuration, rather than with the transcendent resurrection of the body in spirit. The natural universe is so real to Ammons's imagination that his poem about the earth rolling in space is spoken with an ease foreign to most efforts to "imagine" a cosmic perspective. Only Wordsworth had a comparable iron sense of fact:

We go around, distanced,
yearly in a star's
atmosphere, turning
daily into and out of
direct light and
slanting through the
quadrant seasons: deep
space begins at our
heels, nearly rousing
us loose: we look up
or out so high, sight's

silk almost draws us away.

(Frost, who yearned for vision, said we can look "Neither out far nor in deep"; Ammons, in his love of sight, is silently corrective.) Ammons is tugged between sentiment and stoicism, and the play between those two motives is as entrancing as the play between the flow of discourse and the shape of poetry. He is as tender as Keats and as harsh as Keats, reaping some of the same benefits. He does not rise to Wordsworth's full bleakness, but he has more humor and more waywardness than Wordsworth.

"Swells" gives full range to Ammons's sentiment and stoicism alike, to his precise sense of physical motion (in this case, wave-motion), and to his firm momentum-rounding-into-shape. When hundreds of conflicting motions are assimilated into one wave, a paradoxical calm results:

Ocean floor or mountain are alike places where gigantic motions have been summarized into a near stillness:

To climb the summit or find that summary so hard to summon to mind, and there to hear the hum (as Stevens called it) of the universal pantomime, might be in another poet a forgetful sublimity. But Ammons, like Keats, cannot forget the world where men sit and hear each other groan; he ends his poem by saying he has sought out the summit for "rest from the ragged and rapid pulse, the immediate threat/ shot up in a disintegrating spray, the many thoughts and/ sights unmanageable, the deaths of so many, hungry or mad." Mortality swells so agitatingly into presence at the end of the poem that the hoped-for contemplative calm is shaken and bruised. The ills of the body and of the spirit are all there are; we die hungry or mad, our pulse ragged or rapid. In nature, of course, there is nothing "unmanageable"; the word is meaningless in the cosmos, and takes on meaning only through human will, afflicted by thoughts and sights too painful to be borne. If only, like the geologic strata or the ocean floor, we could manage "the constant, universal assimilation: the/ information, so packed, nearly silenced with majesty." But we do not, and cannot, for long. The possibility, and the impossibility, of psychic assimilation are held in equilibrium in the long oceanic swell of this Stevensian poem—which should be read with Stevens's "Somnabulisma" and "Chocorua" as its predecessors.

It is a mark of Ammons's variety that it is very hard to generalize about his practice in this volume. Almost every poem has a distinctive shape and a set of new strategies, imitating the variety of nature:

Ammons matches his loneliness and his freshness to the solitary, permanent, and renewed acts of nature; and in his

"central attention" he keeps the universe alone. The poems enable us to watch this poet going about the business of the universe, both its "lost idyllic" and its present broken radiance. He has been about this business for years now, but I notice in reading this new collection how much more secure his language has become. Once, he was likely to err both in amassing scientific words too lavishly and in affecting too folksy a tone. Now the scientific world in Ammons is beautifully in balance with the perceptual one, and the tone is believably, and almost perfectly, colloquial. The lines are as near as we could wish to the ripples round the ripplestone.