Reviews

Sphere: The Form of a Motion by A.R. Ammons

nickrs's review

4.0

Sometimes willfully awkward, burdened with a blend of gender essentialism and one-world-ism that seems earnest, if knowing—and yet the poem is so often revelatory and true-seeming (thoughts on taxonomy and divinity, remarkably fresh environmental images) that those quirks serve mostly to locate him in cultural spacetime. Ammons so often undercuts himself, but under the auspices of half-jokes he lets himself aphorize more freely, a kind of overtly YMMV approach to performing the poet-metaphysician that ends up yielding more, not less.