Orphan Hours: Poems - Softcover

Plumly, Stanley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393346625 ISBN 13: 9780393346626

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013

Synopsis

“Combines stateliness, formal beauty and emotional urgency in rich and musical tapestries of language. . . . Every poem . . . is masterful.”―Washington Post

Orphan Hours is a book of reconciliation, of coming to terms with time in its most personal and memorable manifestations, and of learning the wisdom of what cannot be changed. The urgency of the elegy has been absorbed by an acceptance of the detail, texture, and small moments that constitute and enrich mortality.

from “Lapsed Meadow"

I remember, in Ohio, fields of wastes of nature,
lost pasture, fallow clearings, buckwheat
and fireweed and broken sparrow nests,
especially in the summer, in the fading hilltop sun,
when you could lose yourself by simply lying down.
Who will find you, who will call you home now, at dusk,
with the dry tips of the goldenrod confused
with a little wind, filling in what’s left of the light.

About this title

About the Author

Stanley Plumly (1939–2019) was the author of numerous collections of poetry including In the Outer Dark (1970), winner of the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award, and Out-of-the-Body Travel (1978), nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Other works include Giraffe (1973), Summer Celestial (1983), Boy on the Step (1989), The Marriage in the Trees (1997), and Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me: New and Selected Poems, 1970–2000 (2000), Against Sunset (2017), and the posthumous Middle Distance (2020). His collection Old Heart (2009) won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Paterson Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. He authored four works of prose: Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography (2008), which was named runner-up for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography; The Immortal Evening: A Legendary Dinner with Keats, Wordsworth, and Lamb (2014), which received the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism; Elegy Landscapes: Constable and Turner and the Intimate Sublime (2018), and Argument and Song: Sources and Silences in Poetry (2003). Plumly was a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland as well as Maryland’s poet laureate from 2009 to 2018.

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393346625
• ISBN 13: 9780393346626
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 112