The Marriage in the Trees [Hardcover]

Stanley Plumly (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 1997

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Arguably a shade lighter in tone than 1989's Boy on the Step (LJ 10/15/89), Plumly's sixth collection of lyric poems nevertheless sustains the air of melancholy his readers have come to expect; trees are "gothic with winter," a neighbor seems "boiled at birth/ in anger," and the streets harbor characters out of Fellini ("Dwarf with Violin"). When Plumly considers nature he approaches it on human terms, as metaphor ("The sycamore made maps of disappearance"), as literary creation rather than thing-in-itself. He shares with Keats?an explicit if ghostly presence here?and the Romantics the assumption that other living things possess an unknowable wisdom we can only appreciate intuitively. Peering into the invisible, the poet tries to fathom the patterns and forces to which all things submit. Earthy, edgy, and ethereal, these poems speak with dignity and simplicity; they collude with our fleeting senses of presence and absence, jar us when necessary, but at times strive to formulate the questions whose answers have no end.?Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

Alms
The Art Of Poetry
Canto Xviii
Cardinals In A Shower At Union Square
Complaint Against The Arsonist
Conan Doyle's Copper Beeches
Constable's Clouds For Keats
Detail Waiting For A Train
Dove
Doves In January
Drunks
Dusk Coming On Outside--------, New York
Dwarf With Violin, Government Center Station
Farragut North
Field
For Judith On Valentine's Day
For My Father, Dead At Fifty-six, On My Fifty-sixth Birthday
Human Excrement
Humility Elm
In Answer To Amy's Question What's A Pickerel
Keats In Burns Country
The Last Parent
Lazarus At Dawn
The Marriage In The Trees
Nobody Sleeps
One-legged Wooden Redwing
Panegyric For Gee
Reading With The Poets
Red Somersault
Shadower
Snipers
Souls Of Suicides As Birds
State Birds
White Bible
White Oaks Ascending
Will Work For Food
William Matthew's Armistice Poppies
Woman Drowns After Slipping From Floating Refrigerator
Woman On Twenty-second Eating Berries
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 79 pages
• Publisher: Ecco; 1st edition (January 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0880014873
• ISBN-13: 978-0880014878
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,209,206 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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