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Old Heart: Poems

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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.

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.