Epoch, Volume 52, Number 3
ed. by Roger Gilbert
Cornell University, $5.00

Epoch is usually a slender quarterly, but this issue is massive (736 pages) and devoted entirely to the life and work of A. R. Ammons, who died in 2001. It's terrific, full of surprising and revealing documents, and a model of inventive, diligent, and scrupulous editing. Besides a generous selection of late poems (in truth, the weakest part of the issue) and an assortment of critical commentaries by heavy-hitters like Helen Vendler and Robert Pinsky (second-weakest), there is a log of Ammons's time on the USS Gunason in the South Pacific during World War II, various other early writings, a selection of Ammons's watercolors (surprisingly good), warm reminiscences of a man who was clearly very gifted at friendship; and, best of all, a range of Ammons's candid and often brilliant correspondence from the fifties to the nineties. If you're at all interested in the work of A. R. Ammons, whose work is wildly uneven but at times truly great, you should get your hands on this issue.

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