It is hard to think of any poet who has written as well about the natural world as Amy Clampitt does. "The Kingfisher" opens with nine splendid poems about the New England seashore—its weather, its tidal flora and fauna, and its effect on the observer. But this is not to be thought of as "nature poetry" if that term suggests the vague outlines, suffused with metaphysical half ideas, of Wordsworth and the American Transcendentalists. One is led to imagine the writings of an expert naturalist with a poet's virtuoso command of vocabulary, gift for playing the English language like a musical instrument and startling and delightful ability to create metaphor—to invoke a spectrum of previously unthought-of but apt associations beyond the scope of ordinary human imagination.

When you read Amy Clampitt, have a dictionary or two at your elbow. Her curiosity and lovingly precise attention to...