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“... Amy Clampitt died in 1994, at the age of 74; Knopf had published her first book of poems, The Kingfisher, in 1983. It was followed by What the Light Was Like (1985), Archaic Figure (1987), Westward (1990) and A Silence Opens (1994) – five books in 11 years. These are the books that make up this Collected (which does not include Clampitt’s chapbook, Multitudes, Multitudes, privately printed in 1973 ...”

“... Amy Clampitt is a most spirited and exhilarating performer. An enormous appetite for observation and zeal to describe precisely what she has observed are transmitted through both the best and the least successful of her poems. ‘Gusto’ is the word that springs to mind – and not only because it was a term of the highest commendation with the senior American poet whom, in many superficial respects, she most closely resembles: Marianne Moore ...”

“... The lemur-student can see       that an aye-aye is not an angwan-tibo, potto or loris. Amy Clampitt can probably tell an aye-aye from an angwan-tibo and might well have chosen those lines as an epigraph for The Kingfisher. Hers is a poetry of minute discriminations. Unlike those unbotanical ‘Down East people’ who talk loosely of ‘that ...”

“... a group of them with her calm, uncreased prose – John Ashbery, James Merrill, A.R. Ammons, Amy Clampitt, Charles Simic, Dave Smith, Seamus Heaney, Louise Glück, Jorie Graham and Rita Dove. Vendler is in love with the lyric, indeed so in love with it that she befriends strangers who appear to resemble it: in her collection of review-essays, Soul ...”

“... paradise, ploughing in hydrofoils across the wine-dark Aegean. One of the strengths of Amy Clampitt’s new book is its awareness of this field of force, this imaginative map ingrained with irony. Starting from a description of a Greek statue in Berlin, it moves towards the               middle of the earth, yearned- for ...”

“... and caricature, and felt that ‘large orchestration’ was in short supply. A few years later Amy Clampitt paid homage while also suggesting that ‘perhaps one day Stevie Smith will be seen as having to some degree paved the way for a body of work whose upper register is distinguished by a spaciousness and clarity hers never achieved.’ The idea ...”