Readers already familiar with Ammons s longer mode in other books will welcome this new collection, while those familiar only with the shorter poems will find their appreciation of his work both deepened and heightened. The Selected Poems: 1951-1977 was described by one critic as an indispensable book; Selected Longer Poems is an indispensable companion to it."

To the "visions of clarity and terror" in that volume the poet now adds the most important poems from his three books published since. The resulting collection is the essential starting place for new readers, the quarry for those familiar with his work. Among the new poems is "Easter Morning," which the critic Helen Vendler called "a classic poem . . . a revelation."

Filled with sharp irony and passionate insight, the more than 100 poems in the collection span the career of one of the deans of contemporary poetry. . . . Ammons makes you laugh and forces you to think hard about the way humans relate to natural phenomena and to themselves. From such simple, short expression emerge complex, often confounding ideas. New readers of poetry as well as those with an active interest in lyric verse will love this volume. Booklist"

This is the most surprising formal invention of a major innovator, is the fullest vision Ammons gives us of his enormous creative enterprise. Among the major descendents of Whitman s Song of Myself, Tape occupies an essential imaginative space, showing us much about what is essential in the American poetic imagination. Harold Bloom"

Sphere is the second of A. R. Ammons's long poems--following Tape for the Turn of the Year and preceding Garbage--that mark him as a master of this particular form. The sphere in question is the earth itself, and Ammons's wonderfully stocked mind roams globally, ruminating on subjects that range from galaxies to gas stations. It is a remarkable achievement, comparable in importance to Wallace Stevens's Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.

The more than 150 poems inBrink 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.

A superb long poem by the contemporary master of the form, Glare comprises two sections, "Strip" and "Scat Scan." The poem demonstrates, yet again, why A. R. Ammons's poetic voice is a national treasure: by turns cosmic, self-inflating, self-deflating, eloquent, intimate, bawdy, comic, precise and always unmistakably his own."

In the poetry of A. R. Ammons, Helen Vendler has written, "the scientific world is beautifully in balance with the perceptual one." Originally published in 1982, this collection reminds us why Ammons must be read by all those who would understand our age and one of its most brilliant voices.

"It will seem increasingly to many attentive readers that this volume the most distinguished book of American verse, in my judgment, since the publication of Wallace Stevens's Collected Poems in 1955 marks the permanent establishment of a major visionary poet." Harold Bloom "No mere gathering of poems, this collection is like one an explorer brings back." David Kalstone"

Of this volume, the noted critic Harold Bloom has written, "A Coast of Trees represents A. R. Ammons at his strongest and most eloquent in the lyric mode. The book is an achievement fully comparable to his Uplands and Briefings. Among the poems likely to assume a permanent place in the Ammonsian (and American) canon are the majestic title lyric and 'Swells, ' 'Easter Morning, ' 'Keepsake, ' 'Givings, ' and 'Persistences.' Again Ammons has confirmed his vital continuities with the central Whitmanian tradition of our poetry, and his crucial place in that panoply."