SOURCE: "Trash and Other Wonders of Nature," in The New York Times Book Review, Vol. 98, December 12, 1993, p. 30.

In the following excerpt, Hirsch praises Ammons's Garbage.

Archie Randolph Ammons's book-length poem, Garbage, the winner of this year's National Book Award, has a rueful grandeur and characteristically splendid oddity. Following the abbreviated lyricism of the retrospective volume The Really Short Poems, Garbage is a single extended performance, a meditation, as the poet says, "assimilated into motion." Over the last 40 years Mr. Ammons has consistently demonstrated the democratic precept that "anything is poetry" and here he playfully takes up—takes on—the subject of trash. Thus a mountain of junk near the I-95 in Florida becomes the site of his moving and often comic speculations about natural processes:

     garbage has to be the poem of our time because
     garbage is spiritual, believable enough
 
     to get our attention, getting in the way...