Nomad Routes

By Martha Duffy

WESTWARD

by Amy Clampitt; Knopf; 128 pages

$18.95 hardcover, $9.95 paperback

Amy Clampitt was in her late 50s when her first book of poems appeared in 1983. As if to make up for lost time, she has since published three additional volumes. She writes with such easy eloquence that it is hard to believe she has not already enjoyed several prolific decades. The Kingfisher was an outstanding debut -- mature, allusive verse that assumed a reader who had traveled and read a bit. In a climate of minimalists and confessional poets, it was a nourishing refreshment, and it won a well-deserved National Book Award (back when that group saw fit to applaud poetry).

The following two volumes, What the Light Was Like (1985) and Archaic Figure (1987), added to Clampitt's reputation and, perhaps too readily, the verbiage at which she can be a little too facile. With her gift for images, gigantic vocabulary and command of classical literature, she might have become a parody of the ornate Gerard Manley Hopkins. Westward, thankfully, reverses that tendency. It still helps to know that Mulciber is another name for the fire god Vulcan, and that punto in aria is a kind of lace. But these poems speak directly to the reader, as if the writer had discarded the scrim of erudition.

Clampitt is a great one for setting out on journeys. Her point of departure is usually Manhattan, for which she has scarcely a good word. "A glittering shambles/ of enthrallments and futilities," goes one complaint; "a warren of untruth, a propped/ vacuity." Some of her lighter excursions are to Maine, the inspiration of some lovely, limpid nature writing -- about picking blueberries "the color/ of distances, of drowning," or a day of "bone-white splendor,/ a slow surf filleting the blue."

There are a few longer works here. My Cousin Muriel describes a harrowing visit to the nursing home where her relative is dying. When Muriel, "fatigued past irony," asks about her work, she struggles:

Well, it's my function

to imagine scenes, try for connections

as I'm trying now: a grope for words.

The elegiac title poem Westward is about another journey, from London's Euston Station by rail toward the Western Isles of Scotland. Contemplating Margaret Thatcher's England, she reflects on the "frayed-/ out gradual of the retreat from empire." The Prairie is a reverie, expressed with extreme simplicity, on the peregrinations of her forebears from the Midwest to California and back again. "To be landless, half a nomad, nowhere wholly/ at home, is to discover, now, an epic theme/ in going back," she concludes. Clampitt is wisest when she is plainest. At her best, she writes poetry that, in Marianne Moore's words, "comes into and steadies the soul."