On May 29, 1979, Mary Jo Salter, then a young editor at the Atlantic, wrote her first fan letter. The recipient was Amy Clampitt, a 58-year-old poet whose work had recently begun to appear in that publication and various other magazines. Ms. Salter praised Clampitt’s poems, which “unfailingly send me to the dictionary at least once, and although I don’t consider this a prerequisite exactly, it does speak for your commitment to precision. You don’t write like other people.”Indeed, Clampitt was one of a kind, her work stubbornly and satisfyingly unclassifiable. She managed to be both, her poems depicting the various locations she visited or called home, but also chronicling escape, immigration, disorientation and dispossession.

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