Amy Clampitt, Dave Smith, Marilyn Hacker, William Matthews, and Sharon Olds Summary

Amy Clampitt's first book was not published until she was sixty-three. She worked as a librarian, freelance researcher, and editor. She has written both novels and poems. Narrative scaffolding and a fascination with details from the natural world can be traced to this background. Tourist's curiosities, reader's speculative passions, and citizen's moral quandaries are among her concerns. Morality is a chief theme. The poems in her section include "Beach Glass," "Imago," "Stacking the Straw," and "Medusa."

Dave Smith has taught at many universities and is now a professor at Johns Hopkins University. Smith's poems are both husky and quiet and are reminiscent of Robert Penn Warren and James Dickey. His earlier poems were often dramatic monologues and haunted testimonies; since this time Smith...