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Rating: 
Summary: Mighty oak of a collection of poems
Review: Stanley Plumly is one of the heavy cannons of contemporary American poetry and heads the Univ. of Maryland's successful poetry graduate program. I've read somewhere (probably American Poetry Review) that Plumly always had a very special place in his heart for his father. The title of this fine collection bears witness to that. Poems in this collection are dense, patiently woven rivers of memory. They flow like dark wine distilled from decades of reflection, longing, and pain. This is the kind of poetry that stops you in your tracks and demands your full attention and time to feel its delicate capillaries and steep pathways buried under heavy emotional foliage. Out-of-the-Body Travel, Cardinal, Kunitz Tending Roses, Doves in January ("Long o's, long o's, long o's, and then a pause...") are some of the many unforgettable poems in this heart wrenching volume. These are the kind of poems that make one say "if only I could write poems like these I wouldn't do anything else in life." But alas, we can't write poems like these. So that's why we become bankers, engineers, taxi drivers, and municipal workers. And if we are lucky enough, one day we discover Stanley Plumly and know for the first time what our soul was missing for all these years. Buy this book and savor it a few lines at a time, half a page a day, for the next year, like brandy on your tongue, or your father's gravely voice in your ears.
Rating:
Summary: Magnificent
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Stellar Perspective
Review: 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).
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