Few, if any, collections of poems by a major poet have ever demonstrated more forcefully than this one that brevity is the soul of wit. The Really Short Poems of A.R. Ammon's brings together some 160 short poems, spanning Ammon's whole career, ranging from mordantly funny paradoxes to intensely compressed instants of lyric perception. Each one demonstrates the transcendent qualities of intellect and craft that have made A.R. Ammon's among the most honoured American poets today. They comprise a uniquely entertaining volume that makes his genius accessible to a new generation of readers. Ammon's originality does not reside only in the singular awareness of science that informs much of his work...Nobody else's poems manage to sound quite so genuine and unforced as they compress observation into metaphor, identifying the poet's self with what he sees.