The City Limits
Like much of A. R. Ammons’s poetry, “The City
Limits” explores the uneasy relationship between
modern civilization and the natural world. The im-
ages that Ammons uses in this poem, such as his
consideration of the sound of “birds’ bones” or of
the “glow-blue” of the bodies of flies, make read-
ers aware of the subtle things in the natural world
that ordinarily would go unnoticed. He also draws
readers’ attention to dark, fearsome, and unpleas-
ant aspects of the world around them, such as the
“guts of natural slaughter” that flies feed on and
the “dark work of the deepest cells,” an allusion to
cancer. It is typical of Ammons’s poetry that he is
able to show the duality of the way that humans
view nature. After making his readers uncomfort-
able, Ammons ends by making a convincing case
that understanding can make fear of nature “calmly
turn to praise.”
This poem was first published in 1971, when
Ammons’s reputation as a major American poet
was already established. It is available in his Col-
lected Poems, 1951–1971. For the following thirty
years, before his death in 2001, Ammons contin-
ued to be an innovator, changing styles and pro-
ducing a varied legacy of poems ranging from
book-length to just a few lines long. Throughout
the last half of the twentieth century, he was con-
sidered to be a central figure among the growing
number of poets who embrace the spiritual aspects
of science and nature.
A. R. Ammons
1971
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