Amy Clampitt, who has just made one of the most brilliant debuts in recent American literary history, can do everything with words but tell a story—and stories are what she wants her poems to be. In The Kingfisher she takes up (or intends to take up) narratives involving great public themes—religion, politics, history, the Nazi holocaust, self-immolation as a form of protest, nuclear devastation, even the anguish Israel stirs in the Jewish pacifist. She also addresses (or wants to address) decisive personal moments—a dazzling glimpse of art ordering the disarray of life ("Dancers Exercising") or, conversely, a dark vision of the terrifying disorder just behind the comforting insulation of the quotidian ("A Hairline Fracture").

But her talent is neither narrative nor dramatic, and the plot of her poems is often left to the copious notes at the end of the book….

In Clampitt's work, one...