Whole Look of Heaven

By A.T. Baker

SPHERE 79 pages. Norton. $6.95 hardcover;

$1.95 paper.

COLLECTED POEMS 1951-1971 396 pages. Norton. $12.50. Both by A.R. AMMONS

He is neither polemical, esoteric, alienated nor even suicidal. Yet A.R. ("Archie") Ammons has belatedly emerged as a poet of major stature. Given the present state of poetry, that is not an all-out accolade. Yet at his best, Ammons is a poet who finds high images in the familiar. He celebrates earthworms and maggot flies, the trackless ocean and flooding brooks, and sees them all as shapers of a higher order, an order of diversity and character that makes life infinitely interesting and indomitably self-renewing. If he has a bias, it is praise:

for the inexcusable (the worthless

abundant) the merely tiresome, the obviously

unimprovable,... nothing useful is of lasting value: dry wind only is still talking among

the oldest stones.

Though his intent is always serious, he can also be funny:

In the summer I live so close to my neighbor I can hear him sweat... his lawnmower wilts my cereal:

I'm for ice and shutters and the miles and miles winter clears between us.

Ammons came late to poetry. The son of a North Carolina farmer, he studied science at Wake Forest but did not have enough money to complete graduate work at Berkeley in English. He spent ten years selling glass medical gadgetry for a New Jersey firm; characteristically, he did it so well that he ended up as an executive vice president. But like Wallace Stevens at that Hartford insurance company, Ammons wrote poetry in his spare time, published some of it and waited. Then in 1964 he gave a reading at Cornell, and someone asked why he did not teach. He countered, "Why don't you offer me a job?" They did. Now, at 48, he is a full professor at Cornell, and his collected poems won the National Book Award.

Ammons' finest poems meld the hugest images with the most familiar speech to make his points with tight concision:

A mountain risen

in me

I said

this implacability

must be met:

so I climbed

the peak:

height shook and wind leaned

I said what

kind of country is

this anyhow and

rubbled

down the slopes to

small rock

and scattered weed.

Of late, Ammons has indulged in several very long poems. They are per- haps verse rather than poetry (verse being what good poets write when they are waiting for a poem to strike). But at least it is verse of a high caliber:

by the time I got the world cut down

small enough that I could be the center of it, it wasn 't

worth having:

His latest long poem, Sphere, just now published in a separate volume, is a long rumination on his favorite theme that "harmony can be recognized in the highest ambience of diversity." The verses vastly resemble a stream-of-consciousness diary. Sentences leap across stanzas without a pause, and Ammons never uses a period, only colons, to separate one sentence or thought from another. The thoughts are often homey enough: "Some people when they get up in the morning see the kitchen sink, but I look out and see the windy rivers of the Lord in the tree tops: you have your identity when you find out not what you can keep your mind on but what you can't keep your mind off."

More than any living modern poet, Ammons successfully connects the intricacies of science to the mystery of human nature and what he perceives as the high design of God. He traces the death of a burro from the jaguar's kill to the consumption of the carcass by ants. Finally "bacteria boil the last grease mild." And so for humans. In "our skinny house perpetual, where in total diminishment we will last, elemental and irreducible ... beyond the autopsy and the worm, the blood cell, protein, amino acid, the nervous atom spins and shines unsmirched."

In perhaps the best passage of Sphere, Ammons produces an extended metaphor that expresses his faith in resurgence, in death and resurrection both in nature and in the spirit:

I want to be declared a natural

disaster area... I want to be the aspect above which

every hope rises, a freshening of courage to millions...

I want to be the shambles, the dump, the hills of gook the

bulldozer shoves, so gulls in carrion-gatherings can fan my

smouldering, so in the laciest flake of rust I can witness my

consequence and times:

I want to be named the area where

charlatan rationality comes to warp, where the smooth finishes

bubble and perk, where aerosol deodorants lose their breath:

when the freeze of this century retreats, leave me the slow

boulders and smashed pebbles... where the wind

can come among the grasses and weeds, robins nest in high wheels

under the whole look of heaven

sbA.T. Baker

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