The distinguished poet A. R. Ammons once described himself as, ?not so much looking for the shape as being available to any shape that may be summoning itself through me from the self not mine but ours.? This ?availability? has enabled his poetic genius to be at home in forms raging from brief lyrics?the best of which he brought together in The Selected Poems: 1951-1977?all the way to poems of full book length.