Brink Road and Postmodernism
A.R. Ammons' last Book of Poems Explores his Relationship to Nature
Brink Road exhibits themes familiar to postmoderism and responds to alienation from a higher power through a complex relationship to nature.
A. R. Ammons (1926-2001) published Brink Road in 1996 toward the end of a poetry writing career that dates back to the 1950s. A Goldwin Smith Professor of Poetry at Cornell University, he has been widely praised by the two leading poetry critics of recent times, Helen Vendler and Harold Bloom.
Ammons’ poetry is more accessible than many well liked contemporary poets. For instance John Ashbery and Derek Walcott are widely admired English language poets, but their level of difficulty leaves some readers aside. Ammons has been linked to Emerson by Bloom, others compare him to Frost - both rather accessible poets.
Ammons’ Wide Poetic Range
What sets Ammons’ poetry aside from other poets is his relentless wordplay and forward motion. Reading Ammons, one gets the sense that there is someone struggling to make sense of it all. He twists and turns side to side, up and down like a fish on a hook, but that is not quite the point. Readers enjoy the extremes he explores and the tremendous ground he covers. It is his ability to cover many different imaginative vistas - mountains that talk, tigers that are hard to scare, indefinable ways of knowing - that make his poetry gnarly and raw.
Brink Road and Postmodernism
Brink Road was the last of his short poem collections, though there is a longer poem in the book called “Summer Place.” One of the poems in Brink Road, “Cool Intimacies,” describes how communication is limited in certain ways: “What the power is and what / we can do to save / ourselves with or from it / how are we to know, / receiving is sieved, in hints / and double blips, echoes from / dubious bluffs, silent / declarations, birds and leaves / in motion, announcements / from ’bodies’ and points of light: / flood or puddle, whatever / it is, it stands / in the Way: we here and / there ride, wade, drown.”
The poem is suggestive of the post modern predicament because it identifies an instability with regard to matters of ultimate authority, i.e. “the power.”
Brink Road and Nature
Although postmodernism sometimes supports a survival of the fittest mentality, there are relations between the human and natural world in Ammons’ poetry that are beyond the scope of a strictly materialist viewpoint. In “Early Stones,” also from Brink Road, Ammons writes: “Returning from the thawed creek / and winter-hungry for early slugs or mole crickets, he / turns a stone on the clear-woods floor, thinks to / pick it up, steadying his pace / back to the cave porch where / he drops it, / an investment against the fireless / summer nights when the tiger / moves too near in, hard to scare.”
The simple movement of the stone is suggested as a protection from potential harm in the tiger in the summer, possibly through its being a reminder of the earlier winter season or of the walk that discovered it.
In another highlight of nature, “Blues in the Valley,” Ammons portrays his feelings toward the setting sun: “light bands near sundown / break out / underpinning the clouds on west hill, / and I know how / they’ve looked before, may look again, / how they’ll thin down and fine away.” Although some of Ammons’ poetry reflects postmodern philosophy, he remains in other senses more like a romantic poet such as Emerson in that he places such a high value on the natural world.
Ammons was awarded two National Book Awards, in 1973 for Collected Poems 1951-1971 and in 1993 for Garbage.
