Ammons deals with his world immediately. The macrocosm and microcosm of nature occupy his imagination, and he defines himself by his way of facing these ultimate challenges. In his engaging new collection [A Coast of Trees] he has some exquisite love poems and a couple of tender descriptions of old men trying to look after their frail wives. He also has an elegy on his own boyhood.

But as usual, nine-tenths of the poems invite us to stand with the speaker isolated in a landscape, sharply observing some particulars of the scene while responding with quasi-didactic reflections. The most densely populated of the poems is centered on a graveyard.

As if to make up for the lack of human agents, Ammons regularly personifies the features of landscape that hold his attention. Sometimes this habit can give sharpness to an image, as when a thawing brook "steps" down a ledge;… But when the poet exchanges opinions with a mountain (as in "Continuing"), I balk.

Selfhood, for Ammons, means the establishment of healing continuities in the face of unpredictable, often withering disruptions. So it is restorative for him to notice how the elements of landscape survive and establish a new balance after destructive assaults. On such images of change, loss, and restoration he concentrates an attention sharpened by scientific training.

Ammons's handling of free verse evokes the process he celebrates. One characteristic of the normally short lines is what might be called radical enjambment, or the ending of lines after words that demand an object or complement—adjectives, prepositions, transitive verbs, conjunctions. Another peculiarity is the repetition of a few key words, often three times or more. In spite of the apparent freedom of form of the whole poem, Ammons generally returns at the end to an image prominent at the start, to which he then gives new depth; and the poem often turns formally on the movement from observation to reflection. The effect of the enjambments, the repetitions, and the circular form is to suggest the disruptions, continuities, and resolutions of the flow of our emotions. The short poems of Ammons have more power than the long, because he tends to neglect shape and point when he becomes discursive.

An invitation to misread the poetry is the surface of calm in Ammons's work. Strangers may suspect him of complacency. But like Stevens and Bishop—two other poets obsessed with landscape—Ammons has only a slight hold on his hard-won moments of tranquillity. The bleakness of human life breaks out in phrases like "the many thoughts and / sights unmanageable, the deaths of so many, hungry or mad."…

The underlying sadness rises to anguish in "Easter Morning," the longest poem of the book. Here the lonely poet expresses his bitterness over the deformations produced in a child like himself by the imperviousness of adults who die before they can recognize and redeem their errors. Mourning for the person he might have been, the poet faces the graveyard in which are buried those people—teachers, relations, parents—who could have saved him from becoming a man more at ease with brooks and hills than with human society. The power of the poem springs from the central conceit of the isolated individual standing before the sociable dead.

But he does not see his crucifixion as unique….

In the last third of the poem, the theme of resurrection emerges, in the shape of two large birds seen flying together. When one veers from the straight way, the other notices and joins him. Then both return to the original route. The watcher admires their possession of free patterns which they may companionably leave and return to, unlike the rigidity of his own development; and he admires the beauty of the "picture-book, letter-perfect" morning. (p. 46)