The Kingfisher is a book of tough stuff, full of dirt and doctrine. Since dirt and doctrine are the stuff of Great Plains Poetry and literature in the medieval period (where I have tried to plant my flag), I can treat what Clampitt does by describing how she handles the dirt of the prairie and the visionary lights of medieval religion. She is first a poet of dirt, not of space or history after the manner of Charles Olson and the New Poundians…. The transformation of guilt into dirt and of expiation day (or judgment day) into washday bespeaks both the religion and the region.

Part of Clampitt's capacity to handle prairie-plains themes and her sort of religious insight comes from the combination of capacity to handle extended syntactic structures having a disciplined rhythmic character while moving across the dirt comprising prairie space-and-time as if it were a...