SOURCE: "Six Reviews," in Poetry, Vol. 147, No. 3, December, 1985, pp. 156-58.

In this review of What the Light Was Like, Gilbert criticizes Clampitt's obvious and, in her opinion, tedious use of literary references and excessively poetic phrasing.

Especially on the East Coast, Amy Clampitt has been widely hailed as the latest wonder woman of contemporary poetry. Perhaps most notably, Helen Vendler enthusiastically commended this writer's first volume, The Kingfisher, for the variety, the complexity, and, indeed, the difficulty of its vocabulary, but more recently—and more extravagantly—Mona Van Duyn (on the cover of What the Light Was Like) has characterized Clampitt as the offspring of a fantasy marriage between Marianne Moore and Gerard Manley Hopkins. The phenomenon represented by this suddenly made and meteorically ascending reputation is an interesting one, suggesting that some readers are almost desperately nostalgic for the good old pre-"Beat," pre-"Deep Image," pre-...