Some forty-odd years ago, I picked up a copy of Amy Clampitt's The Kingfisher from the slush pile of books to be reviewed at The Cincinnati Enquirer. I chose it because I had seen and liked one of her poems in The New Yorker.
That book has been shifted from place to place, apartment to house, unread, for four decades. This week I picked it up, began to read it, and discovered that it is astonishingly good. That should have been obvious because Richard Wilbur, whose taste was infallible, proclaimed it astonishingly good in the copy on the dust jacket.
One touch:
"Grief / is original, but it / repeats itself; there's nothing / more original that it can do."
I wonder, can you name a book whose belated discovery has overpowered you with its quality?
