Stanley Plumly

Old Heart

Poems

“Successor to James Wright and John Keats, with a marvelous ear for the music of contemplation.”
—Rita Dove, The Washington Post

In his new collection, Stanley Plumly confronts and celebrates mortality—in the detailed natural world, in the immediacy of the loss of friends, and in personal encounters. Archetypal, sometimes even allegorical, the poems in Old Heart amount to a sustained meditation. The American Academy of Arts and Letters declared of Plumly that “he has in the last thirty years quietly, steadily, expanded the range of lyric poetry in English ... [and] reinvigorated our poetry.” His ethical rigor and literary modesty combine in Old Heart—his finest book of poetry.

from “Childhood”

                       Let the stone gods
In their fountains move like clockwork—
they’re no less rooted in the rain
nor their marble less perfection of the snow—
let the clay gods circle in the fire. The body
piecemeal wastes away, the something soul
slips from the mouth, muse and sacred memory
shuts its eyes. I died, I climbed a tree, I sang.

Stanley Plumly won the Delmore Schwartz Award and was recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, among many other honors. He teaches at the University of Maryland, College Park, and is currently writing a meditation on John Keats.