SOURCE: "High Reachers," in Poetry, Vol. 165, No. 3, December, 1994, pp. 158-65.

In the following review of A Silence Opens, Shaw praises Clampitt's ability to impose an order upon the multitude of small details that leads the reader to the poem's moral message.

Amy Clampitt's latest book [A Silence Opens] like her earlier ones, is at first a little intimidating in its bursts of abundance. It can seem like a cornucopia out of control. Rather than shrinking back, it is best to allow oneself to be engulfed; what seems a welter proves to have a fair amount of order after all. The plenitude in question is both in subject matter and style; geographically and philologically, the poet is well-travelled. While the multiple shifts in location throughout the book may recall Elizabeth Bishop, the style is closer to that of Bishop's mentor Marianne Moore. Like Moore, Clampitt collects curious, almost random-seeming...