"No contemporary poet, in America, is likelier to become a classic than A. R. Ammons."―Harold Bloom With characteristic economy, A. R. Ammons writes that "Brink Road lies off NY 96 between Candor and Catatonk." The very name suggests that we are ever in transition from one state of mind to another always on the edge of revelation. The more than 150 poems in Brink Road date from 1973 to the present, dealing with Ammons' 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.
Author
Archie Randolph Ammons was born outside Whiteville, North Carolina, on February 18, 1926. He started writing poetry aboard a U. S. Navy destroyer escort in the South Pacific. After completing service in World War II, he attended Wake Forest University and the University of California at Berkeley. His honors included the Academy's Wallace Stevens Award, the Poetry Society of America's Robert Frost Medal, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lived in Ithaca, New York, where he was Goldwin Smith Professor of Poetry at Cornell University until his retirement in 1998. Ammons died on February 25, 2001.
