From Publishers Weekly
Selecting from six collections spanning 30 years, this well-focused collection starts off with new poems and works backwards, forming a single unbroken arc that nicely maps Plumly's poetic obsessions: a drunk father, avine fauna and city vagrants, and meditations on larger-than-life figures like Keats and friends like William Matthews. A pre-modernist aesthetic predominates, moving through a gamut of forms from blank to metrical verse, and the whole is suffused with an elegiac tone that is always credible if rarely surprising. Most of the poems stick to hushed description; earlier ones, like "For Esther" or the title poem, are more willing to make additive leaps: "There is no star in the sky of this room,/ only the light fashioning fish along the walls./ They swim and swallow one another." At least two poems ("Souls of Suicides as Birds" and "Cedar Waxwing on Scarlet Firethorn") join birdsong to human grief in an ecstatic swoon: "before the treesA/ to be alive in secret, this is what/ we wanted, and here, as when we die what/ lives is fluted on the air." Plumly's poems are, without exception, exceptionally well-made, though the pathos-of-my-labors that drives poems like "Complaint Against the Arsonist" ("This pyrrhic fire the barn burned down and blew back/ into the dust-weight of its carbon barn I spent the summer part-time painting ") can seem a little shopworn. Often enough, however, something ravenous emerges, as in the free-verse "Woman on Twenty-Second Eating Berries," a poem that weaves together many of Plumly's leitmotifs. There, the title persona feasts on "Poor grapes, poor crabs,/ wild black cherry trees, on which some forty-six/ or so species of birds have fed, some boy's dead/ weight or the tragic summer lightning killing/ the seed." (June)
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From Library Journal
Throughout this accomplished poet's previous six books, the presence of his father, who died in 1973 of complications of alcoholism at the age of 56, has been very real. In an interview in the Iowa Review (Fall, 1973), Plumly commented, "I can hardly think of a poem I've written that at some point in its history did not implicate, or figure, my father." This latest collection, which includes many poems published in earlier collections (including the book's final poem) as well as some new ones, brings the father's presence into the book's title for the first time: "Whatever two we were, we become/ one falling body, one breath." Plumly, who has taught at the University of Houston and the University of Maryland, College Park, writes in an accessible style, dreamlike though rooted in reality, musical, graceful, but with an eerily tragic undercurrent: "and when we drive along the white glide of the river,/ the high wheat grass like water in the wind,/ someone in joy running from the house,/ the story is already breaking down." Highly recommended.DJudy Clarence, California State Univ., Hayward Lib. CA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
