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Stanley Plumly's masterful eighthcollection--wherein heconfronts and celebratesmortality--was a finalist forthe National Book Award in Poetry.

In this collection, Stanley Plumly confrontsand celebrates mortality--in the detailednatural world,in the immediacy of the loss offriends, and in personalencounters. Archetypal, sometimes even allegorical,the poems inOld Heartamount to a sustainedmeditation. The AmericanAcademy of Arts and Letters declared ofPlumlythat"he hasin the last thirty yearsquietly,steadily, expanded the range of lyric poetryin English...[and]reinvigoratedour poetry." His ethicalrigor and literary modestycombine in Old Heart--hisfinest book of poetry.

Customer Reviews (2)

Philosophical Butterfly
In a poem about a deer lying in the grass " tucked away from the traffic ", Plumly gives us the natualist's
appreciation of the family Cervidae: " belonging to the order Ruminantia, ruminators, contemplators,
also known as fliers for their ability to outleap sudden danger and to sleep, at the ready, standing."
It's not a stretch to think that Plumly may want us to think of poets as being of that same family.

Plumly writes ruminative verse where he can examine a thing, a thought, or an emotion searching for its
"truth, then beauty". He is a generous poet: one does not get the impression that his verse is unnecessarily,
or deliberately complex, or that he thinks frustration is a poetic tool.

We will know that the following things are at the heart of Mr. Plumly's mind: butterflies, birds, Keats,
relatives, other poets. He is not usually funny, though "Ted Hughes's Collected Poems" musters our wry
smile as he weighs ( almost literally ) the collected poems of Hughes, Larkin, Lowell, and Delmore Schwartz.

I would recommend the following poems to see Plumly at his best:
"Meeting Mr. Cole", "Pastoral", "Hermeticism", "Nostalgia", "Audubon Aviary" and "Paraphrase of the Parable
of the Prodigal Son".

"Meeting Mr.Cole" recounts Plumly's encounter with the poet Henri Cole's father. The verse is conversational,easy:
"I remember I sat in the backseat with a tire
and fishing paraphernalia and an open rusty
toolbox, as if this part of the car ( a sea-salt
scoured blue Chevy ) were part of the trunk..."

Mr.Cole, a former Navy man, "was tall, like Henri, but utterly, apparently, opposite from Henri's natural elegance".
In addition, we get a little more than a physical description with these lines:
"Henri's father was that softer soul, a fisherman
a beach bum, someone who'd retired early deeply".

The colloquial tone continues: " whether he met us or took us to the station at New Carlton I've forgotten...."
Now, Plumly wants us to experience the moment, the " anger, yet affection between them" and the absences and
silences" then the caring, shy formalities....how similar yet different they seemed". And then comes the
philosophical payoff-- earned by the piling up of detail: " how we all change with time but don't". The poem
effectively makes us present at a past event to arrive at an eternal truth.

In conclusion, the better poems outnumber the weak ones, the generous tone invites our intellectual and moral
participation and we can learn about birds, butterflies, and Audubon's techniques ( and John Keats's cautions
to his brother about the dishonest Audubon ). Not bad.

National Book Award Nominee
This capstone collection by one of America's finest poets was recently nominated for the National Book Award.Elegant, alert, and wise, these poems are informed by a lifetime of thought and feeling expressed with masterly poetic skill. ... Read more

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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 WorldJohn 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. 7 illustrations ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

Poet on poet
This is a gorgeous book.It is also heartbreaking.Plumly brings to Keats the generosity of heart and the capaciousness of mind ("negative capability," some might call it) required to enter deeply into the late poetry and the astoundingly painful last year of the poet's life.This book is, I think, guaranteed to make you love Keats more and, just possibly, like doctors less!

Should Be Welcomed By Special Interest Readers;Not for the General Reader
"Posthumous Keats" is described as a personal biography, of John Keats, of course, one of the famed English "Romantic Poets" of the early 19th Century, who, in a very short life,gave us such works as "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode to a Nightingale," and "La Belle Dame Sans Merci."The book has been authored by Stanley Plumly, a talented, prize-winning poet himself, currently Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park.Plumly has won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, the Delmore Schwartz Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors.

Keats was only 25 years old when he died in 1821, after an agonizing year-long struggle with tuberculosis, in Rome, where he'd gone to flee the harsh English winter.He left behind, too, a secret engagement, and an ambivalent relationship, never consummated, with Miss Fanny Brawne.He was almost alone in Rome, little-known and quite poor; but at his death, he did also leave behind several devoted friends, and family members,many in possession of "fair copies" of his best-known poems, and a great deal of insightful correspondence.Their memorialization made his short life, significant work, and hard death the stuff of undying legend.

Plumly has obviously done a great deal of research in creation of this work, and it shows."Posthumous Keats" is full of highly-interesting information, on England, particularly London; and Italy, particularly Rome; as they existed in the 19th century; on the social life and organization of those societies as they then existed, and most particularly on the parlous state of medicine then.Seems like the universal cures were laudanum (an opium derivative) and bleeding, just what a tubercular patient needed.Furthermore, as a poet himself, Plumly is extremely well-qualified to explicate Keats' limited oeuvre.He also has a poetic writing style: in fact, the book's an excellent combination of subject and author.However, it's nearly 400 pages long, and I wouldn't call it easy reading, or particularly accessible.There is no biographical material on the subject per se, I can't think why not: anyone already familiar with the poet's life need not have read it.And just a page or two's worth of introduction would have been most helpful, instead of the teasing little hints about the poet's life that Plumly drops here and there.

Finally, and I know I've gone on about this subject before, but the illustration situation in this book is dire. They are very few, quite small, in muddy black and white, at the heads of chapters. They aren't identified on site; the reader must look to the end of the book to discover their titles; then back to the beginning of the book, to discover their page locations again.And: the illustrations are discussed in the book's text, but nowhere near their actual locations: what general reader is going to look back through the text to find the discussions of the illustrations?

So I'm afraid I can't recommend it for the general reader, which I consider myself to be.I've said it before elsewhere, but it probably bears repetition, in the interests of disclosure; I never have been a great fan of the English Romantic Poets.The required course in this subject caused me to drop the English major at Cornell University, after I'd bought the six required books of poetry, one of them Keats,' to be sure, and realized, once again, that they weren't for me.And during my stay in Rome, I certainly found my way to the Spanish Steps, but, thoughtlessly, never to the house where Keats died, now a museum, in plain view from the site.Still, I was eager to learn more about Keats, his life and work, from this book.And, mind you, I did.But only with a certain amount of difficulty, and not as much as I hoped to. "Posthumous Keats" should be welcomed by special interest readers, but general readers, be warned.

A curious work
I read the Ricks' review of this book in the NY Times and ran to get it. Ricks is the best Tennysonian I have ever read and i respect his work a lot. However, I was a bit perplexed at all the hoo-ha. First, you must come to this work very well-versed in your Keats--both his poetry and his life. So if you have not read (about) Keats, this is not the autobiography for you. That said, Plumly is clearly besotted with his subject matter, and that can be good and bad. His imagistic, tender, subjective musings can also be jarring and confusing. His use of the present tense is pretentious, and sometimes he goes way overboard with his own poetic musings on the poet's feelings about death (all conjectural).

And yet, a lot of this book is compelling simply because of the emotion behind it, the sheer investment. However, if you want to know about Keats' youth, his boyhood, you get almost nothing. The lack of sequence can also be annoying--you are forever returned to that ghastly death-chamber. It gets to be too much. Also, Plumly tries to outdo Keats in terms of the sensuality, the fullness, of his figurations--as if he is competing with the poet. A no-win situation.

So I give a divided review here. i am glad I read this book but do not feel as if igained much knowledge about the poetry or the poet. i did learn a lot about TB and 19th c quackery, however.

A Memorable Death, Honored and Remembered
Maybe because I recall with haunting clarity a visit made years ago to the small apartment above the Spanish Steps in Rome where the 25 year old poet, John Keats, died .... I was moved, engaged and enlightened by this wonderfully-written record of the poet's last days.Plumly's writing is masterly, the information well delivered. A book to enjoy and muse over. Carey Roberts

Plumly Brings John Keats Closer to Us
It's strangely satisfying that it's two poets who have brought John Keats and his immediate world to vivid life.Way back in 1925, Amy Lowell gave us the first well-researched biography of Keats that is still a relevant and great read today.And now poet Stanley Plumly has given us a profound, demythologizing study of Keats's last 18 months and the reactions of his family and friends to his death.

Plumly's volume is an obvious work of love.He writes a straightforward history of Keats's last months, and then muses over the details from different perspectives.He turns a forensic as well as a philosophical eye on the motives and actions of Keats's inner circle of friends, spending considerable time ruminating on the characters and principles of Charles Brown, William Haslam, George Keats, and - of course - Joseph Severn.We see Keats's last days not just as they probably were, but as they must have been.And we see John Keats himself:fragile and anguished, full of vigor, innocence, trustworthiness, incredible talent, and deep, abiding love for Fanny Brawne and life itself.

Plumly's most remarkable accomplishment is his interweaving much of Keats's great odes with the young poet's experiences and literary philosophy.That a youth so inexperienced in life, so poor, and so desperately ill could write what many believe to be the greatest series of odes in English is astounding.I remember being blown away by Keats's odes in my high school English class, and now Stanley Plumly has written a book that explains to me why.

Keats's opening lines of his long poem, Endymion, certainly applies to his own work:

"A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing." ... Read more

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New Hope for the Dead: Uncollected Matthews is the last of poet William Matthews’ posthumous collections, following Search Party: Collected Poems (Houghton Mifflin) and The Poetry Blues: Essays & Interviews (University of Michigan Press), all edited by son Sebastian Matthews and close friend and fellow poet Stanley Plumly. New Hope for the Dead features the best of Matthews’ remaining uncollected work, including over 30 poems spanning Matthews’ prolific but tragically cut-short career. But unlike the first two collections, New Hope for the Dead features Matthews’ unheralded talents as a short story writer, food writ ... Read more

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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. ... Read more

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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.

Customer Reviews (5)

Stellar Perspective
Stanley Plumly's poems could be described as quietly magnificent. There is an amplitude and gracefulness to the work that hearkens strongly back strongly to the nineteenth-century Romantics, in particular Keats: "Like some dreams, they appear, then reappear, / cloistered in the space of their own wounding, / their public mourning, their gravity's gray coat. / Even at a distance, as if drawn by being seen, / they come straight at you, the almost elegant woman / in the aisle, the tall young birdlike silent / weeping man . . ." (from "Grievers").
Yet Plumly never sounds antique. Reading the poems in this new, retrospective collection is an experience in following a thought process that is physically embodied in phrases, complex sentences and vivid images embedded in articulate lines. Doubters who question whether any of today's poets have schooled themselves sufficiently in the hard apprenticeship of Yeats and other poetic forbears should listen and take heart: "Sound of the breath blown over the bottle, / sound of the reveler home at down, light of / the sun a warbler yellow, the sun in / song-flight, lopsided-pose. Be of good cheer, // my father says, lifting his glass to greet / a morning in which he's awake to be / with the birds . . ." (from "Cheer").
Plumly's poems are muted in manner yet never tentative; sonorous and fluent while refusing to be merely beautiful. He persists by searching out new ways to see, new ways of grasping what it means to be alive in these drastically fragile bodies. His book's title alludes to a strangely ambiguous evocation of parent and child lying beside one another - perhaps a small boy and his father, but more likely a diminished and failing father whose still vital son is recognizing in their unaccustomed intimacy a rare bridge across distance.
One of the wonders of this selection of Plumly's work drawn from thirty years is the way the book is arranged as a continuous sequence "in reverse chronological order," with only a brief author's note to indicate the original book titles. It is uncanny to see how comparable in acuity and eloquence the early and later poems really are in this fresh reading. The book lingers in its look back, filled to the brimming point with birds, trees, and people that are gone, all gone, residing now only here. Truly, a life's work.
Plumly has never been prolific - three slender books in the 1970s, two in the 1980s, and only one in the 1990s. Yet his ode-like soundings of mortality have accumulated in power and resonance. His voice is; the care with which these poems were made is evident in every line. This, then, from "Doves in January": "Long o's, long o's, long o's, and then a pause, / a whistle more like someone's voice than song, / as if in a moment a day could pass // from nothing's grief to some becoming grace.

Jim Schley, who lives in Vermont, is the author of a poetry chapbook, One Another (Chapiteau, 1999).

Magnificent
Stanley Plumly isn't just a great poet. He is possibly the greatest American poet writing today and this compilation is a journey through some of the best poetry of the past thirty years. The depth of thought present in this work and the manner in which that depth is conveyed hold ground by even the most demanding poetic standards. Having interviewed him in the past, I can vouch for Plumly's genius. One look at his writing is all that the reader needs to vouch for his talent. A talented writer when he began, he has honed his skills over the past thirty years to a level that borders perfect. This books belongs on the bookshelf of anyone whose tastes include good poetry. You won't find a better volume of modern American poetry around.

Heard it, bought it
I attended Plumly's reading here at Grinnell College two days ago.His voice was intoxicating-- sort of an articulate growl.I had to buy the book (and get it signed, of course).One of the most striking pieces, I believe, is "Wrong Side of the River," an excellent demonstration of his simple prose and resonating imagery.Beautiful.

An Essential Poet
This New & Selected by one of our finest poets, is a must-buy.Lyrical, tender, profound--his images will linger with you, and you will find yourself rereading and later quoting his lines.

Master work
Plumly's newest book brings together some of the best poems of his career...some of the best poems written in America in the last 30 years.I've read over ten volumes from April's "National Poetry Month"and nothing makes me wince more than those poets who feel the need to endeach poem with that cryptic/cute/"stunning" last line that veersaway from the poem's topic and story in an attempt to be wise.Plumly isin control of his material; even when he sums up a poem in a final line, itfits, it flows, it adds to the sum of the poem rather than leaving thereader wondering.

Family, images of the natural world informing andreflecting the subjective human world, words and form often perfectlywedded:Plumly, nominated for the Natl Book Award in the past surely mustbe recognized alongside of Merwin, Pastan, Gluck, J Graham, Levine, Kinnellas one due further recognition and awards. ... Read more

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Stanley Plumly is one of his generation's most important poets.He was born in Barnesville, Ohio, in 1939, and grew up in the lumber and farming regions of Virginia and Ohio.Writing in the Atlantic, Peter Davidson said of his work, "Plumly's rich, dense poems give off a special fragrance, the incense of the English Romantic movement mingling with the forest odors from the Old Northwest Territory between the Mississippi, the Ohio, and the Great Lakes."

This volume collects fifteen of Plumly's [previously published] essays on poetry and art, including the seminal "Chapter and Verse," "Sentimental Forms," and "The Abrupt Edge."Meditating on poems by Keats, Stevens, James Wright, Plath, and Matthews, on Emily Brönte's prose, and paintings by Whistler, Plumly returns again and again to essential matters: the impulses, occasions, and places out of which art arises and the forms by which imagination gives it shape. ... Read more

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Winner of the 2001 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry.

"Barot’s mature linguistic skills really come down to a metaphorical and musical intelligence that refuses to value one element over another, that will not let the language or the longing take over."—From the Foreword by Stanley Plumly

"This is a book of lyric wonders: wit that turns dark, darkness that blazes up again in music and story."—Eavan BolandRick Barot is currently Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University. He was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended Wesleyan University, the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, and Stanford, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow in Poetry.

Customer Reviews (8)

A truly talented poet
Get this book if you're looking for real poetry writing.Barot is an amazing poet who has an amazing eye.His images are exact, precise, beautiful, and powerful.He follows in the tradition of Elizabeth Bishop.He is clearly a smart and thinking poet.He writes about intelligent things.Granted, some people might find this a bit "high brow" for them, it is not for the unsophisticated poetry reader.If you want simple, go read Billy Collins or some other easier poet.If you want something more challenging, get this book.Start with easier poems like "Occupations" and "At Point Reyes" and then go for all the poems on the philosophers.You'll ease into it better.There is no other poet writing like Barot today and you owe it to yourself to read him if you are a lover of poetry.

Average First Book of Poems
I read this book after two different people recommended it to me.I should mention that both people who recommended the book are friends of Barot's.I found this book to be rather average in terms of first books.I wasn't impressed, and I wasn't annoyed. I am not sure what to make of all the attention this book is getting on Amazon; clearly Barot has friends and enemies.This book lead me to believe Barot has talent, but like many first books, the talent has yet to be realized here.Many of these poems are too hermetic, too in love with beauty to see the real subjects behind the poems.That this book won a contest doesn't surprise me.I am sure it is better than the vast majority of book manuscripts being entered in the contests.But in the grand scheme of things, this book is simply a signal there might be better things to come.This is a book worthy of a read, just not worthy of a purchase.Check your local library.

A Beautiful Book
"An idea in a poem," Wittgenstein once wrote, "is overstated if the intellectual points are nakedly exposed, not clothed from the heart."While there are as many Wittgensteins as there are poetries, I can think of no other recent book in which the ideas are so gloriously fitted-out as Rick Barot's The Darker Fall.It's hard to quote from this book, or rather, it's hard to select just one quote from this book, since there isn't a single weak poem in this book (and how many first books can you say that about?) and since Barot's gift for image and metaphor (those famously unteachable gifts) is unequaled by any young poet I can think of, and not that many older poets.Here's a few: one sky "opaquely clean as a bottle's bottom," another sky "plum-black, woodsmoke / waxing on its skin.""the view from a window down to wet cars, / each roof a nail painted in black polish." The influences which shaped this book include the ones referred to in the book (Montale and Bishop) and also (among many others) the early Bloodlines and China Trace era Charles Wright, the Wright of "Tattoos" and "Skins," a poet fiercely grounded in place, but able make each place an element of a personal mythology. Which is to say that I don't see a ceiling for this talent.

Bad News, Good News
This book demonstrates the total inability of most of today's younger poets to find a middle ground between an "experimental" and "traditional" voice (both voices being the academic product of pretty much the same overeducated and overprivileged people, poets who write not from deep experience but from what they think poetry should be).

Barot comes from the traditionalist camp with a vengeance, writing pretty little poems about the superficial joys of paintings, photos, flowers, European cities and the like. The poems are good, in their small way, and probably to be preferred to the lazy word games and theory-driven cliches of the unreadable and self-appointed "avant garde," but are nonetheless completely derivative and fundamentally dishonest. That someone like Eavan Boland should therefore adore and blurb for this book is no suprise.

The good news, however, is despite his current results, Barot has real skill--an eye for detail, a supple imagination, a fine music.
He's got all the tools and a lifetime to try and make them add up.Despite this book's badness, Barot appears to be one of a few, a very few, to watch.

Boring and trite
This book put me to sleep.It's dull,but it also feels fake,dependent on cliches and received ideas.The titles give a sense of what the poems are like:Plato,Bonnard,Rome,Montale,Wittgenstein,Miro,Bronzino,Bishop,Benjamin,Keats,flowers,plants,birds.There's nothing fresh here.It's exactly the kind of book that gives poetry a bad name.It makes you cringe.

I don't understand why this kind of precious,privilegedwriting appears year after year,when there's so much that hasn't been written before.I also don't understand why poets like this one,who aren't devoid of intelligence or talent,don't write better poems.They may be polished,but polish isn't enough. ... Read more

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A galaxy of writers epitomizes the state of American poetry at the century's close. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

One of the Poetry Collections I Turn to Again and Again
Stanley Plumly is one of my very favorite poets, and one of my greatest influences.Three of the poems from this collection stand out in particular: "After Whistler"; "Promising The Air"; and "Maples". "After Whistler" includes such turns ofphrase as "There in the calendar dark" which are words you feelphysically and understand emotionally.

In "Promising The Air",Plumly describes a woman who dreams of a small boy and cries for him in hersleep, and he finishes the poem by dedicating it to her and "for theboy"-- which is a Stevens-like abstraction of acknowledging the realforce and presence of the dream boy.

In "Maples", Plumlydescribes a vacation with his parents, the "honey moon" in thetrees, and driving along the road in the dark.

I am describing all ofthese poems from memory because I know them so well; Plumly is one of themost important contemporary poets we have and deserves far more attention. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (4)

Inward & Luminous
Biespiel's first book is subtle and vital.His work, as he says in "A Love Story," "pushes hard as a conscience."I loved the pace of the lines, the richness of the emotional content, the recurringtheme of the preciousness of both love and loss, and the unique combinationof dense and simple language.Best poems:"There Were No Deer in theThicket," "I Think of Your Eyes," (which I first read on aPSA Poetry in Motion project in Portland, Oregon), "Autumn of theBody," Tower," and "Constitutional."Shattering Air unites the natural world with the human spirit, in line after line, so thatpoetry enters one's life as a living element, like blood.When is his nextbook coming out?I can't wait.

Biespiel's poems are both original and universal.
I'm not sure I read the same book as the reader from Ohio.David Biespiel's first book is both original and universal.The long poem, "Holy Water" is Keatsian in its reverie and Whitmanic in itsrange.Whereas most new poets want to demonstrate technical,graduate-school dazzle, Biespiel is content to let a quiet, understated,mature, and haunting language penetrate a reader's emotions, to gently leada reader down a path of revelation.I would say he is the W.S. Merwin ofhis generation. The best of these mostly love poems are "There WereNo Deer in the Thicket," "Holy Water,""Constitutional," "A Love Story," and the frighteningnarrative "Tower."It's exciting to read work from this newgeneration of poets.The work of David Biespiel, along with TalvikkiAnsel, Christian Wiman, Campbell Mc Grath, and A.V. Christie, is settingthe pace for excellence."Shattering Air" was good the firsttime I read it; I've since read it again, and the effort is well-rewarded.

Biespiel's poems are both original and universal.
I'm not sure I read the same book as the reader from Ohio.David Biespiel's first book is both original and universal.The long poem, "Holy Water" is Keatsian in its reverie and Whitmanic in itsrange.Whereas most new poets want to demonstrate technical,graduate-school dazzle, Biespiel is content to let a quiet, understated,mature, and haunting language penetrate a reader's emotions, to gently leada reader down a path of revelation.I would say he is the W.S. Merwin ofhis generation. The best of these mostly love poems are "There WereNo Deer in the Thicket," "Holy Water,""Constitutional," "A Love Story," and the frighteningnarrative "Tower."It's exciting to read work from this newgeneration of poets.The work of David Biespiel, along with TalvikkiAnsel, Christian Wiman, Campbell Mc Grath, and A.V. Christie, is settingthe pace for excellence."Shattering Air" was good the firsttime I read it; I've since read it again, and the effort is well-rewarded.

Hollow
Though Biespiel's poetry is technically sound and though the male perspective on abortion should offer a welcome voice, the poems here are hollow and dispassionate and at times offensive in their lack of depth. The poems here are easy to read and feel as if too easily written, despite the obvious talent of the poet. ... Read more

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In the Poetry Blues, the late William Matthews holds forth on a medley of topics ranging from jazz to nude photography, Byron to Elizabeth Bishop, opera to Emerson. Throughout, Matthews writes about his love of music, language, poetry, and art while illuminating the subtle and important ways in which the things about which he feels passionately help to define and shape him.
The book begins with a candid autobiographical essay, followed by an interview on the influence of jazz music on the poet's early work. Further into the collection, Matthews delves into the nature of the epigram and the work of jazz great Charles Mingus. Along the way, this revered poet offers insight into the work of this contemporaries, including W. S. Merwin, Galway Kinnell, Hayden Carruth, and Richard Hugo.
the book is as much autobiography and cultural criticism as it is literary nonfiction. It will be of interest to writers and teachers of writing, as well as to lovers of literature, language and music.
Sebastian Matthews teaches writing at Warren Wilson College. Stanley Plumly is Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland.
... Read more

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Customer Reviews (2)

Moving_Again
The book was everything it was described to be, (and more, to me), because of the poems.

Superb craftsman with a wry intelligence and a penguin wit.
William Matthew's collected poems are a joy as well as a challenge to read. He does not take the easy route to any conclusion, and the twists and turns can take you into poetic spaces it's not so easy to get out of. His language is superb regardless of the subject, which is far-ranging with much allusion to music and culture. He is an inspiration for other poets because of the amazing marriage of brilliant intellect and the hand-held phrase. ... Read more

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This digital document, covering the life and work of Stanley (Ross) Plumly, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thompson Gale. The length of the entry is 1502 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
• Family members
• Education
• Professional associations and honors
• Employment
• Writings, including books and periodicals
• A description of the author's work
• References to further readings about the author

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Chapters: Stanley Plumly, Charles W. Sanders, Joseph Haines Moore, Gary Sandy, Kriss Worthington, Todhunter Ballard, J. Brent Bill. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 26. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Stanley Plumly (born 1939 Barnesville, Ohio) is an American poet, who is professor of English and director of University of Maryland, College Park's creative writing program. "This poet hymns unlikely things, finding beauty and grace where they were overlooked, so that a frightful contraption like an iron lung can become a miraculous vehicle for 'out-of-the-body travel', the major metaphor as well as the tile ot Plumly's finest collection (1977). In the same way, wildflowers we may have scarely noticed, like meadow-rue and peppergrass, are shown to have the same kind of unlikely and stirring beauty. Stirring, perhaps, because unlikely, rescued from a modest oblivion to enhance our sense of life. Stanley Plumly grew up in Ohio and Virginia and was educated at Wilmington College in Ohio and at Ohio University. He taught for a number of years at Ohio University, where he helped found the Ohio Review, and he has been a visiting writer at a number of other institutions, including Iowa, Princeton, Columbia, and the University of Washington. At present, he teaches in the writing program at the University of Maryland." His parents, Herman and Esther Plumly, lived in rural Ohio and Virginia. He graduated from Wilmington College, and from Ohio University with his M.A. and Ph D. in 1968. Plumley's work has been published in The Atlantic Monthly, The American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Paris Review, among others. His poems and essays have been selected for 40 anthologies, including From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright (2008). In 2009, Plumly was ...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=6147212 ... Read more