Collected Poems of Stanley Plumly

This definitive retrospective gathers the work of an allusive, musical, and stylish writer and introduces nine new poems to his oeuvre. As in Plumly’s Selected Poems, the entries are presented in reverse chronology, helping to highlight the evolution of the poet’s voice, his turn towards a longer, more narrative line, and the connecting thread of his lyric sensibility. These selections are populated by other poets, especially his beloved Keats. They are sensuous poems of desire and love of nature, particularly bird life, and are haunted by memory and its replaying, particularly of his family (there are countless visions of his parents). His father looms especially large, at some points “the man standing before his children with nothing,” and at others a more complicated, violently tender figure who becomes a guide after his early death: “the floor waxed white, into my father’s/ arms, who lifts me, like a discovery, out of this life.” “Language is a darkness pulled out of us,” Plumly notes. Elegant, stately, and immersed in literary history, this is a grand summation of the poet’s life. (Aug.)