Few human beings inhabit the typical Ammons landscape—indeed, the poems that home toward the center of his visions are landscapes: either literal mappings of place and event or philosophical graphs of the questing mind and spirit. The powerful imprint of a primal communion between poet and place that informs Tape for the Turn of the Year is never entirely erased from Ammons' pages, no matter how quickly they are written and gathered into books. That Ammons must remember one-ness and is forced—by inner compulsion as well as by conscious choice—to measure each new walk, each new moment, against those "blackcherry" days gives his voice both its great particularity and its pathos. (p. 4)

Surely no poet actively writing today observes with Ammons's precision—he captures each flick and rustle with clean, indelible strokes. Yet, faced with displays of such meticulous calibration of mainly transient phenomena, we...