Old Heart: Poems [Hardcover]

Stanley Plumly (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 17, 2007

"Successor to James Wright and John Keats, with a marvelous ear for the music of contemplation."—Rita Dove

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.

Editorial Reviews

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.)
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Review

“Plumly's rich, assured new book includes poems about poets of his own generation, living and dead, and of the past....The interplay between words and reality, mortal imagination and the lasting world, shimmers in these poems.” (Robert Pinsky - Washington Post Book ) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 96 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (September 17, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393065685
• ISBN-13: 978-0393065688
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.7 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,603,453 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars National Book Award Nominee, October 10, 2007

By 

Robert Duistermars (Roanoke, VA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Old Heart: Poems (Hardcover)

This capstone collection by one of America's finest poets was recently nominated for the National Book Award. Elegant, alert, and wise, these poems are informed by a lifetime of thought and feeling expressed with masterly poetic skill.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Philosophical Butterfly, September 8, 2009

By 

B. Albanese "nonothing" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Old Heart: Poems (Paperback)

In a poem about a deer lying in the grass " tucked away from the traffic ", Plumly gives us the natualist's
appreciation of the family Cervidae: " belonging to the order Ruminantia, ruminators, contemplators,
also known as fliers for their ability to outleap sudden danger and to sleep, at the ready, standing."
It's not a stretch to think that Plumly may want us to think of poets as being of that same family.

Plumly writes ruminative verse where he can examine a thing, a thought, or an emotion searching for its
"truth, then beauty". He is a generous poet: one does not get the impression that his verse is unnecessarily,
or deliberately complex, or that he thinks frustration is a poetic tool.

We will know that the following things are at the heart of Mr. Plumly's mind: butterflies, birds, Keats,
relatives, other poets. He is not usually funny, though "Ted Hughes's Collected Poems" musters our wry
smile as he weighs ( almost literally ) the collected poems of Hughes, Larkin, Lowell, and Delmore Schwartz.

I would recommend the following poems to see Plumly at his best:
"Meeting Mr. Cole", "Pastoral", "Hermeticism", "Nostalgia", "Audubon Aviary" and "Paraphrase of the Parable
of the Prodigal Son".

"Meeting Mr.Cole" recounts Plumly's encounter with the poet Henri Cole's father. The verse is conversational,easy:
"I remember I sat in the backseat with a tire
and fishing paraphernalia and an open rusty
toolbox, as if this part of the car ( a sea-salt
scoured blue Chevy ) were part of the trunk..."

Mr.Cole, a former Navy man, "was tall, like Henri, but utterly, apparently, opposite from Henri's natural elegance".
In addition, we get a little more than a physical description with these lines:
"Henri's father was that softer soul, a fisherman
a beach bum, someone who'd retired early deeply".

The colloquial tone continues: " whether he met us or took us to the station at New Carlton I've forgotten...."
Now, Plumly wants us to experience the moment, the " anger, yet affection between them" and the absences and
silences" then the caring, shy formalities....how similar yet different they seemed". And then comes the
philosophical payoff-- earned by the piling up of detail: " how we all change with time but don't". The poem
effectively makes us present at a past event to arrive at an eternal truth.

In conclusion, the better poems outnumber the weak ones, the generous tone invites our intellectual and moral
participation and we can learn about birds, butterflies, and Audubon's techniques ( and John Keats's cautions
to his brother about the dishonest Audubon ). Not bad.