Review Quotes Clampitts letters, which reveal her sense of literary vocation. In letters to Helen Vendler, Mary Jo Salter, and others, she discusses her poetry as well as her surprise at her newfound success and the long overdue satisfaction she obviously felt, along with gratitude, for her recognition.

In the last decade of her life she appeared like a meteor on the national literary scene, lionized and honored. After struggling as a novelist, Clampitt turned to poetry in her fifties and was eventually published in the New Yorker. She conveys her delight in a variety of day-to-day experiences and sights, reporting on trips to Europe, the books she has read, and her walks in nature. Clampitt also reveals her passionate interest in and fascination with the world around her. In other letters she describes a religious conversion (and then a gradual religious disillusionment) and her work as a political activist. She recounts her struggle to find a place for herself in the world of literature as well as the excitement of living in Manhattan. She offers, with wit and intelligence, an intimate and personal portrait of life as an independent woman recently arrived in New York City. Written in clear, limpid prose, Clampitts letters illuminate the habits of imagination she would later use to such effect in her poetry.

Her letters from 1950 until her death in 1994 are a testimony to her fiercely independent spirit and her quest for various kinds of truth-religious, spiritual, political, and artistic. Amy Clampitt was an American original, a literary woman from a Quaker family in rural Iowa who came to New York after college and lived in Manhattan for almost forty years before she found success (or before it found her) at the age of 63 with the publication of The Kingfisher. Book Synopsis This extraordinary collection of letters sheds light on one of the most important postwar American poets and on a creative womans life from the 1950s onward.

About the Book Amy Clampitt was an American original, a literary woman from a Quaker family in rural Iowa who came to New York after college and lived in Manhattan for almost forty years before she found success at the age of 63 with the publication of her poems in The Kingfisher.

Truth in the dark by amy lane