The Late Bloomer

“An eccentric woman deserves an eccentric biography.” So writes Willard Spiegelman in this first biography of the poet Amy Clampitt. If there was anything eccentric about the genteel bohemian Amy Clampitt, it was that she was extremely private about her private life—which makes writing her life story a singular challenge. Indeed, the subtitle of Spiegelman’s book is “The life and poetry of Amy Clampitt” (my emphasis). Although she was often autobiographical in her poems, Clampitt was never a confessional poet. We have no record of divorces, breakdowns, births, addictions, or abortions, because there were none. We do know that much about her. If not the chronicle of an “eccentric,” then, this is an extremely courteous and well-mannered biography of a mild but chatty bohemian and, considering the huge gaps in the personal history, a well-wrought and engaging attempt at reconstruction, with detailed analyses of the poems to fill things out.