The Kingfisher is Clampitt's first volume, in many ways an almost dazzling performance. (p. 430)

The interlocking of vowel and consonant sounds is as impressive as the range of the diction, the way the words function to broaden implication as they echo, reflect, and refract one another.

I began this book as I recommend you begin it, at the back, by reading the notes. Besides making individual poems easier to read, this exercise will introduce you immediately to certain important facets of Clampitt's sensibility. For one thing, we notice an interest in the life sciences—biology, ornithology, oceanography, anthropology—along with literature, mythology, history, and the classical world generally. One result of all this learning (facts, book facts, what are you?) is a tendency towards pedanticism, an overloading of the poems with accurate detail at the expense of feeling, emotion. Clampitt seems to prefer the past to the present...