Brink Road: Poems

By A.R. Ammons

Book Overview

With characteristic economy, A. R. Ammons writes that Brink Road lies off NY 96 between Candor and Catatonk. The very name suggests that we are ever in transition from one state of mind to another always on the edge of revelation.

The more than 150 poems in Brink Road date from 1973 to the present, dealing with Ammons's concerns with language, mortality, and the forces underlying the natural world. With elegance, wit, and ruminative gravity, Brink Road is an important addition to one of the most enduring bodies of poetry of our time.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393315975
• ISBN13: 9780393315974
• Release Date: August 1997
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 248 Pages
• Weight: 0.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.6" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Varied scenery on this road

There are a diversity of poems in this collection from 1973 to 1996. As he says "You mosey around, idling here and there for years". Along this route are some of the joys of nature, in the poem Local Antiquities: "the hills, out in the rain, antedate altars". Ammons also stops to examine him age, "I'm too rickety to squat" or perhaps to look at his directions: "I've pressed so far away from my desire ..". There are also road signs about poetry "Poems are forms of protective coloration by which a person insecure in his true colors takes trial stances ...". There are short stretches of road such as the 11 syllable "The Story" to the final long hall, a 45 page poem "Summer Place" "so full of crazy ironies" that includes rebelling about being called a "nature poet" and "why no one expects to pay the poet" and "bowling champions make 12 times as much as poets", and lecherous views of "coeds with the pear-like rondure". By the way Brink Road "lies off NY 96 between Candor and Catatonk"