Clampitt, Amy, 1920–94, American poet, b. New Providence, Iowa. A librarian and editor, she wrote little until the 1960s. Her first major magazine publication was in 1974, and her first commercially published volume of poems, The Kingfisher (1983), appeared when she was 63. Later volumes are What the Light Was Like (1985), Archaic Figure (1987), Westward (1990), and A Silence Opens (1994). Clampitt's collected poems appeared in 1997. Her densely ornate and richly allusive verse is often elegiac in tone, and much of her best work concerns the natural world. She also published an essay collection, Predecessors, et Cetera (1990).
See her selected letters, ed. by W. Spiegelman (2005).
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