Old Heart: Poems - Softcover

Plumly, Stanley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393333183 ISBN 13: 9780393333183

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009

Synopsis

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."

About this title

About the Author

Stanley Plumly (1939―2019) authored ten books of poetry and four works of nonfiction, including Elegy Landscapes, Posthumous Keats, and The Immortal Evening. Winner of the Truman Capote Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize, among others, Plumly was Maryland's poet laureate from 2009 to 2018 and taught at the University of Maryland where he founded the graduate program in creative writing.

From Publishers Weekly

The eighth gathering of poems from Plumly (Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me) offers many beauties but few surprises. Onrushing, almost whispering, pentameters, divided into lyric meditations, depict the winters, summers, springs, snows, fogs, skies and greenery of Europe and of the American East Coast, where Plumly resides. We see a winter city, night city, streetlights/ blurred in mist (Prague); glittering halves of oyster shells; first crocuses and the lavender called redbud blooming on a college campus; even, in one poem called Pastoral, the complexities of leaves,/ the umbels, whorls, bracts, and involucres. Plumly remains as much a poet of elegy as he is a poet of nature: odes and memorials to other poets, living and dead, show how we all change with time but don't. Plumly can seem morbid, or bathetic, as in a sonnet called When He Fell Backwards into His Coffin, about a corpse found in a bathtub; he can also seem content with mere prettiness, speaking nothing but Summer's/ language like sunlight on stone, light itself the stone. Yet Plumly has admirers for good reason: few poets have sounded so often so comfortable at once with the recollections and strong emotions involved in autobiography, and with attention to a beautiful natural world. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0393333183
• ISBN 13: 9780393333183
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 98