Although they shade off into one another, there are basically three kinds of poem in [A. R. Ammons's The Selected Poems: 1951–1977], and they all have to do with nature. First there is the quasi-imagist poem that usually describes a scene or develops a single metaphor while doing so ("Rectitude," "Right On," and "Winter Scene," for example). These poems are the slightest, on the whole, but usually charming. Then there is a parable, distinguished from the preceding by the prominence of the moral and, often, by a dialogue between the poet and his favorite solitary, the wind, or some crusty gulch or sage old mountain ("The Wide Land," "Terminus," "Dunes"). In this mode Ammons can be as winsome as Cummings and as pithy as Frost. The wonder is that he can be both at once. The meditation on nature differs from the parable by virtue of the sweep of the vision, the scope of the speculation, and, sometimes, simple length and a left-hand margin that traces out a "waterline, waterline inexact, / caught always in the event of change" ("Corsons Inlet," "Expressions of Sea Level," "Identity"). This is the most provocative Ammons, the man who puts you in mind of Emerson, Whitman, D'Arcy Thompson, and Whitehead, and whose language and movements are still unpredictable as jumping beans. (p. 96)

It is wonderful how Ammons's poems work, which is as much like the world he loves as possible. As he defines it in "Summer Session," too long to be included in this selection, "the problem is / how / to keep shape and flow:"—a problem momentarily resolved in those lines by the speech unit-line coincidence and the eye rhyme, on the one hand, and the asymmetrical stanza and the characteristic colon, the one punctuation mark that urges forward, on the other. Ammons tries to merge form and flux, to make himself "available / to any shape." If nature continuously changes, he will not come to a full stop during a poem; but if in nature "through change / continuities sinuously work," he will develop a poem in which the idea of shape continues through a series of unique stanza forms. Things in nature are "separate particles" yet related in a "'field' of action," so that is the way they will appear in his poems. (p. 97)

"The structure of poetry and the structure of reality are one": Stevens's dictum could gloss the unity of vision that accounts for much of the vitality and the "widening / scope" of Ammons's work. Sometimes it even seems that he is trying to expand his work until it is coextensive with reality. He wants "no conclusions" and "no boundaries," wants to be as indulgent as "the radiance" he describes in "The City Limits," where he is a wealthy spendthrift of lustrous phrases…. (pp. 97-8)

So it comes as rather a shock to realize that these poems are after all limited. They are limited especially in terms of subject matter, for they have almost no people, no human relationships, and thus a restricted range of emotions. Awe, exultation, bemusement, and mild disappointment we have aplenty—but of such passions as love (excepting two very short "love songs"), grief, and pity, we hear next to nothing…. But it would be ungrateful, in view of all that we have here, to dwell on what we do not have. Besides, Ammons, one aspect of whose outflanking genius is that his poems forecast their possible marginalia, long ago redeemed his own "omissions" when he wrote that "it is not that words cannot say / what is missing: it is only that what is missing / cannot / be missed if / spoken."

Those lines are from "Unsaid," which will indeed be missed. Everyone who knows Ammons's work will discover that at least a couple of favorites have been passed by ("Coon Song" is not here either), but that is inevitable. Going through the short poems in Collected Poems: 1951–1971, from which all but three of these come, one is in the frustrating situation of the tourist visiting the huge collection of small gold pieces from Mycenae: Stunning, but look at that one, and isn't that one exquisite…. The advantage of a reduced selection is that one finds things previously neglected somehow: "The Wide Land," perhaps, or "Project" or "The Quince Bush." On the other hand, in spite of a gesture or two in the direction of a quest for essence (see the opening third of "The Arc Inside and Out," which will bear any comparison with Stevens it provokes), the preference of this "periphery riffler" has always been for inclusion rather than exclusion. And for that reason the Collected Poems represents him more faithfully: it comes closer to the ideal plenitude. As he says wryly in "Cut the Grass," "less than total is a bucketful of radiant toys." (pp. 98-9)