SOURCE: "Imagination Pressing Back," in The New Yorker, Vol. LXVII, No. 16, June 10, 1991, pp. 103-11.

In this review of Westward, Vendler examines Clampitt's use of landscape as a means "to resolve questions of sexual identity, of unsatisfactory family relations, of the expectations of society…."

For Amy Clampitt, landscape is the refuge to which, for its serenity, its visual variety, its biological laws, she turns in order to resolve questions of sexual identity, of unsatisfactory family relations, of the expectations of society, of the history of Iowa (whence she fled, in her twenties, to Greenwich Village). Reading, of course, was one resource of this bookish child, but nothing in her reading—not even Andersen or the Greek myths—ever gave her the pure wordless solace of the earth's changing sights and sounds.

Landscape was for Clampitt the first aesthetic realm, and in a central poem, "The Field Pansy," from her...