we've reams of hopkins-imitators & they're still growing. Clampitt's not so bothered about that label in this, her debut, which wears him in its title. But I like her so much I think she gets away with it. Perhaps a little of what helps is that she's developed a critical eye, this being her debut at sixty three. So there's a stillness, a nod to the legible, which is often enough forgot;

no threat in sight, no hint
anywhere in the universe of that

apathy at the meridian, the noon
of absolute boredom

I read her second collection (What the Light was Like) last year & I was a fan & it's gorgeous to compare the two, Light being in some ways more conceptual in scope (the keats section??) whereas the confidence w/ which Amy's immediately got in The Kingfisher is striking & unbelievable for a debut. There're still some slip-ups, I absolutely find poems like 'Lindenbloom' less convincing with that opening -

Before midsummer density
opaques with shade the checker-
tables underneath, in daylight
unleafing lindens burn
green-gold a day or two ...

but then it picks itself up again & I want to forgive it by closing:

pollen dust
no transubstantiating
pope or antipope could sift
or quite precisely ponder.

ANyway the main attraction here is the famous elegy / anxiety poem for her mother, 'A Procession at Candlemas' which (perhaps tellingly ) drops a lot of the Hopkins & works into a little epigrammatic style, a kind of wisdom lit qua Jorie Graham or something. Actually it's almost a compulsive aphorism ('bad news is what you mainly travel with', 'sooner or later / every trek becomes a funeral procession', 'change as child-bearing'). but I'm impressed by the lucidity of some here;

even a virgin,

having given birth, needs purifying––
to carry fire as though it were a flower,
the terror and the loveliness entrusted

into naked hands, supposing God might have,
might actually need a mother: people have
at times found this a way of being happy.