Although they shade off into one another, there are basically three kinds of poem in [A. R. Ammons's The Selected Poems: 1951–1977], and they all have to do with nature. First there is the quasi-imagist poem that usually describes a scene or develops a single metaphor while doing so ("Rectitude," "Right On," and "Winter Scene," for example). These poems are the slightest, on the whole, but usually charming. Then there is a parable, distinguished from the preceding by the prominence of the moral and, often, by a dialogue between the poet and his favorite solitary, the wind, or some crusty gulch or sage old mountain ("The Wide Land," "Terminus," "Dunes"). In this mode Ammons can be as winsome as Cummings and as pithy as Frost. The wonder is that he can be both at once. The meditation on nature differs from the parable by virtue of the sweep of...