SOURCE: A review of The Snow Poems, in Epoch, Vol. XXVI, No. 3, Spring, 1977, pp. 304-11.

Bullis is an American poet and critic. In the following review of The Snow Poems, he finds that Ammons is one of the few poets to successfully undertake the challenge of the non-narrative long poem. Bullis claims that one of Ammons's greatest strengths, demonstrated in The Snow Poems, is his ability to express the interrelationship of all things, thereby overcoming artificial categories and divisions.

The Snow Poems are actually one poem. It is a diary of the 1975-76 year: a record of Ammons's own experiences, observations, attitudes that begins in the fall with the bird migrations heading south and ends in the spring, with welcoming (the last word of the poem is "we(l)come") "a young/birch frilly in early-girlish/ leaf." The Snow Poems is at the same time an almanac—a...