Rich Harvests of Images : Poet Amy Clampitt and actress Jessica Tandy offered the world very special gifts

The strange and wonderful are too much with us .

The protea of the antipodes--a great,

globed, blazing honeybee of a bloom--

for sale in the supermarket! We are in

our decadence, we are not entitled .

In “Nothing Stays Put,” Amy Clampitt describes, obviously, the exotic flowers and plants that spill out from Manhattan’s greengroceries. But she could well have been describing her own work, a rich and luminous harvest of images, as well as the elegant, enduring performances of actress Jessica Tandy. Clampitt died Saturday at 74; her death preceded by a day that of Tandy, at 85. The two women had far more in common than induction into a grim sisterhood of death by ovarian cancer. In an era when literary and theatrical stars often have an “attitude,” these women were without pretense. They were gifted, hard-working professionals in worlds often dominated by transitory phenoms; genteel, white-haired women among the brassy and sometimes banal.

For their obvious talents, both were richly rewarded, fortunately in their lifetimes. Tandy won four Tony Awards and an Academy Award, among other honors, during a 67-year career that included more than 100 plays, 25 movies and numerous television shows. Clampitt, who published the first of five major poetry collections at 63, was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 1992 and membership in the American Academy and the Institute of Arts and Letters.

Both could dignify the commonplace emotion or image, making it timeless. Miss Daisy lingers with us because of Tandy’s spare but honest portrayal of the aging and fiercely independent Southern woman in the movie “Driving Miss Daisy.” So much of Clampitt’s poetry resonates because she too could connect across generations. To her, the sidewalk “largesse” from the tropics harked back to her prairie childhood, her grandmother’s garden, “a cross-stitch / of living matter, sown and tended by women, / nurturers everywhere of the strange and wonderful / beneath whose hands what had been alien begins / as it alters, to grow as through it were indigenous.”

For Clampitt and Tandy, perhaps there is no more fitting image.