A Silence Opens1994

A poet of place - and displacement - Clampitt captures Umbria in a snapshot of a two-year-old girl, a "ringlet-aureoled refugee from a fresco," and evokes the childhood terrors residing in the darkness of an Iowa apple cellar. Her poems, also, in the words of Mona Van Duyn, "light up human figures, the human drama": Matoaka, whose legend (we know her as Pocahuntus) obscures even what she was called; George Fox, the imprisoned Quaker radical envisioning heavenly rain descending. In A Silence Opens - as in all her work - Amy Clampitt moves, delights, and strengthens us with her joy in life and all the living, the clarity and truth of her vision.