A finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Paterson Poetry Prize. In Old Heart, Stanley Plumly confronts and celebrates mortality in all its rich variety—in the detailed natural world at hand, in the immediacy of loss, and in his own personal encounters. Archetypal, sometimes even allegorical, the material and spiritual levels in these poems speak in one voice and seek the common vision of the empathic imagination. This is Plumly's finest book of poetry—a sustained meditation on "old memory, old worry, old matter from the softest tissue deep.
This is a collection of 15 of the poet Stanley Plumly's essays on poetry and art, including Chapter and Verse, Sentimental Forms and The Abrupt Edge. In them Plumly covers matters such as: the impulses and occasions and places out of which art arises.
A powerful new volume from the National Book Award finalist that demonstrates how the lyric is essentially elegiac. Whether addressing the deaths of friends and other poets or celebrating the closing of the day and the autumn of the seasons, Against Sunset reveals Stanley Plumly at his most personal and intimate. As much an homage to the rich tradition of the Romantics as it is a meditation on memory itself, these poems live at the edges of disappearances. From “Against Sunset” The horizon, halfway disappeared between above and below— night falls too or does it also rise out of the death-glitter of water? And if night is the long straight path of the full moon pouring down on the face of the deep, what makes us wish we could walk there, like a flat skipped stone?
The probing, commanding final volume from "one of contemporary America’s most gifted and influential lyric poets" (David Baker, Kenyon Review). After a diagnosis of cancer, acclaimed poet Stanley Plumly found himself in the middle distance—looking back at his childhood and a rich lifetime of family and friends, while gazing into a future shaped by the press of mortality. In Middle Distance, his final collection, he pushes onward into new territory with extended hybrid forms and revelatory prose pieces. The result is the moving culmination of a long career, a work of fearless, transcendent poems that face down the impending eternal voyage. Plumly populates this collection with tender depictions of poets, family, and friends—the relationships that sustained him throughout his life—as well as unflinching self-portraits. In “White Rhino,” for instance, he adopts the voice of the “last of [his] kind,” using the rare creature as a canvas to depict the dying, aging poet himself. In “Night Pastorals,” he writes vividly and movingly about being on his deathbed, with fragmentary impressions of the other side. In profound lyric narratives, Plumly reaches out to a past that feels closer than ever, returning to the Ohio of his childhood and the shadows of a country at war. Blending documentary and memoir with his signature Keatsian lyricism, Middle Distance contemplates at every turn the horizons of Plumly’s life.
A Los Angeles Times Favorite Book and a Washington Post Best of 2008: “A book worthy of Keats—full of feeling and drama and those fleeting moments we call genius.”—Ted Genoways, Washington Post Book World John Keats’s famous epitaph—”Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water”—helped cement his reputation as the archetype of the genius cut off before his time. In this close narrative study, Stanley Plumly meditates on the chances for poetic immortality, an idea that finds its purest expression in Keats. Incisive in its observations and beautifully written, Posthumous Keats is an ode to an unsuspecting young poet—a man who, against the odds of his culture and critics, managed to achieve the unthinkable: the elevation of the lyric poem to sublime and tragic status.
Many of the poems in The Marriage in the Trees, Stanley Plumly's sixth book of poetry, concern the passing of the author's parents. They have the power of the deeply personal, and are clearly, in their wisdom and mastery of form and language, the work of a mature poet, one of our finest. Images of trees and birds dominate these poems. Birds—owls, doves, crows, and cardinals—whether remembered from childhood or spotted in a rain shower at Union Square, frequently inspire Plumly's lyrical meditations. They serve as symbols of the vitality at the abrupt edges of life. Trees—losing their leaves in the autumn, blooming in the spring, providing wood for both a home as well as a casket and cover from exposure—stand watch over these poems as they do over the life around us, symbols of permanence amid the transience of life. "They/link the past, medieval to modern/the leaves still dark in summer, bronze and butter through hundreds of falls and winters./They're what's left of a larger thing." Memory, history, and family are powerful presences here, the past infusing the present with questions and with meaning. The Marriage in the Trees advances Stanley Plumly's standing as one of our strongest and most accomplished lyric poets.
A window onto the lives of the Romantic poets through the re-creation of one legendary night in 1817. The author of the highly acclaimed Posthumous Keats, praised as “full of . . . those fleeting moments we call genius” (Washington Post), now provides a window into the lives of Keats and his contemporaries in this brilliant new work. On December 28, 1817, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon hosted what he referred to in his diaries and autobiography as the “immortal dinner.” He wanted to introduce his young friend John Keats to the great William Wordsworth and to celebrate with his friends his most important historical painting thus far, “Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem,” in which Keats, Wordsworth, and Charles Lamb (also a guest at the party) appeared. After thoughtful and entertaining discussions of poetry and art and their relation to Enlightenment science, the party evolved into a lively, raucous evening. This legendary event would prove to be a highlight in the lives of these immortals. A beautiful and profound work of extraordinary brilliance, The Immortal Evening regards the dinner as a lens through which to understand the lives and work of these legendary artists and to contemplate the immortality of genius. Winner of the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism
Thirty years of visionary verse from one of America's most memorable lyric poets. From the pastoral to the familial, from the mundane to the transcendent, Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me: New and Selected Poems, 1970-2000 is a musical, multifaceted, and deeply moving series of poems, presenting a panoramic view of Plumly's three decades of poetic inquiry.
A sweeping look at the lives and work of two important English Romantic painters, from a Los Angeles Times Book Prize–winning author. Renowned poet Stanley Plumly, who has been praised for his “obsessive, intricate, intimate and brilliant” (Washington Post) nonfiction, explores immortality in art through the work of two impressive landscape artists: John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. How is it that this disparate pair will come to be regarded as Britain’s supreme landscape painters, precursors to Impressionism and Modernism? How did each painter’s life influence his work? Almost exact contemporaries, both legendary artists experience a life-changing tragedy—for Constable it is the long illness and death of his wife; for Turner, the death of his singular parent and supporter, his father. Their work will take on new power thereafter: Constable, his Hampstead cloud studies; Turner, his Venetian watercolors and oils. Seeking the transcendent aesthetic awe of the sublime and reeling from their personal anguish, these talented painters portrayed the terrible beauty of the natural world from an intimate, close-up perspective. Plumly studies the paintings against the pull of the artists’ lives, probing how each finds the sublime in different, though inherently connected, worlds. At once a meditation on the difficulties in achieving truly immortal works of art and an exploration of the relationship between artist and artwork, Elegy Landscapes takes a wide-angle look at the philosophy of the sublime.
In Mentor and Muse, a collection of twenty-nine insightful essays by some of today's leading poetic minds, editors Blas Falconer, Beth Martinelli, and Helena Mesa have brought together an illuminating anthology that draws upon both established and emerging poets to create a one-of-a-kind resource and unlock the secrets of writing and revising poetry. Gathered here are numerous experts eager to share their wisdom with other writers. Each author examines in detail a particular poetic element, shedding new light on the endless possibilities of poetic forms. Addressed.
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