Amy Clampitt is in the line of remarkable American women poets—Emily Dickinson (see Ms Clampitt's 'Lindenbloom'), Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop (see the rest of her book passim). She ranges from Dickinson's transformations of reality to Moore's and Bishop's beautifully imagined and tensely described surfaces. She is a virtuoso of the here and the palpable.

It is probably only my temperament which causes me to lose patience occasionally with her plethora of description [in The Kingfisher]. She can paint you in words surfaces as touchable as Alma-Tadema's marble, but you wonder whether her effects may not be as empty as his often are…. [The line-breaks in Clampitt's poetry seem highly arbitrary.] This is almost fashion writing in verse, its precision a sort of supreme accessorising of nature. After a while, the closeupness and professionalism induce myopia.

Such detailing is a received style in poetry today: we are...