The MacArthur ‘genius’ poet who got her first break at 58

The late Janet Malcolm memorably proclaimed that a biographer is like a “professional burglar” attempting to break into and enter a life — a busybody and voyeur masked in “an apparatus of scholarship.” Willard Spiegelman’s “Nothing Stays Put: The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt” embodies a different kind of investigation, not surveillance but thoughtful examination that at times still spins off into a kind of awe.