Old Heart

by Stanley Plumly

Overview

A finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Paterson Poetry Prize.

In Old Heart, Stanley Plumly confronts and celebrates mortality in all its rich variety—in the detailed natural world at hand, in the immediacy of loss, and in his own personal encounters. Archetypal, sometimes even allegorical, the material and spiritual levels in these poems speak in one voice and seek the common vision of the empathic imagination. This is Plumly's finest book of poetry—a sustained meditation on "old memory, old worry, old matter from the softest tissue deep."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393333183
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	03/16/2009
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	98
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Stanley Plumly (1939–2019) authored eleven books of poetry, including the National Book Award finalist Old Heart, and four books of nonfiction. His honors include the Paterson Poetry Prize and Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, among others. Plumly was a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland as well Maryland’s poet laureate from 2009 to 2018.

Editorial Reviews

"[Old Heart] contains the lifeblood of song as it defends the crucial endeavor to give each (re)collected moment its living, breathing name."

Georgia Review

"The interplay between words and reality, mortal imagination and the lasting world, shimmers in these poems."

Washington Post - Robert Pinsky

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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