Garbage

by A. R. Ammons

Overview

Winner of the National Book Award.

"A. R. Ammons's poem with the unforgettable title is a defense of meaning—'this,' the poet says, 'are awash in ideality.' Garbage is an epic of ideas: all life—not that of human beings alone, but every species—is shown to be part of an ultimate reality. Eternity is here and now. The argument ranges widely with a wealth of images taken from science, and the world around us, the writing by turns impassioned and witty. For power of the thought and language, the poem takes its place alongside Whitman's Song of Myself—an American classic."—Citation for the 1993 National Book Award for Poetry

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393324112
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	12/17/2002
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	128
Sales rank:	959,280
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.50(d)
Lexile:	1310L (what's this?)

About the Author

A. R. Ammons’s (1926–2001) was a two-time winner of the National Book Award and the recipient of a National Book Critics Circle Award. His many additional honors include the Academy of American Poets’ Wallace Stevens Award, the Bollingen Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Robert Frost Medal, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations.

Editorial Reviews

This book-length poem is the second in Ammons's ( Sumerian Vistas ) prolific and distinguished career. In it, 18 sections of meditative free verse range through mortality, nature and our human place in it, as well as through the ordering circuits of poetry and art. At first Ammons declares, ``This is a scientific poem,'' but he means that the reality of our lives and our work is attuned to the natural world in ways measurable and mysterious, as science is to him. Actual garbage, then, is only the starting point he spins away from and returns to in his musings. It is poetry itself that can cast a spell and prevent death: ``I want to get / around to where I can say I'm glad I was here, / even if I must go.'' Sporadically, the writing here is very fine. Ammons is a master of the music inside the conversational; at times, his words take on the momentum of a fugue. But, as he himself reflects, the poet is occasionally unsure of his mission, goal, substance: ``I can hardly think / or think of hardly a thing to say.'' Although Garbage may strike some as too long, in it Ammons sings pure notes among the others that sound less so. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

ARCHIE RANDOLPH AMMONS'S book-length poem, "Garbage," has a rueful grandeur and characteristically splendid oddity....The poet avows no purpose and endorses a certain poetic aimlessness ("the right / time to write is when you have nothing to say"), yet the work repeatedly returns to, indeed is deeply informed by, a series of ethical propositions: "nature models values" and "likes a broad spectrum approaching disorder"; "right regard / for human life" must respect "all other forms of life"; we, too, are a form of trash, "plenty wondrous." In this major new installment to his life work, A. R. Ammons has given us an American testament that arcs toward praise, a poem of amplitude that confronts our hazardous ends and circles around to saying, "I'm glad I was here, /even if I must go." -- New York Times

Edward Hirsch