SOURCE: "The Cross-Country Poet," in The New Republic, Vol. 203, No. 1, July 2, 1990, pp. 29-32.

In his review of Westward, Morrison attributes Clampitt's appeal to English readers to her attention to detail, her willingness to include the Old World and its history, and her search for emotional roots.

Amy Clampitt's new book opens with a bold piece of imaginative transportation, "John Donne in California," setting down a poet who alluded to America but never visited it among the giant redwoods and "New World lizards" of the West:

 Is the Pacific Sea my home? Or is
Jerusalem? pondered John Donne,
who never stood among these strenuous,
huge, wind-curried hills, their green
gobleted just now with native poppies'
opulent red-gold … 

Donne is far from being the only figure, or indeed the only literary figure, to be uprooted in the course of Clampitt's collection. The central theme of the book, as dominant in...