By Kate Fox
On the dust jacket of In the Outer Dark (1970), Stanley Plumly’s first book of poetry, fellow poet William Stafford writes an endorsement that, after reading Plumly’s Collected Works, strikes me as a premonition as well as high praise:
The rightness of these poems, line after line, exhilarates the reader, who discovers himself (sic) through encounter with a whole range of objects and ideas, each held firmly in language that appears natural and looms from the ordinary into the rich and unexpected.
The gift of Plumly’s poetry is exactly that “encounter with a whole range of objects and ideas,” into which everyone and everything is welcomed. In the Outer Dark introduces some of Plumly’s favorite themes: his family and his home state of Ohio; the art and artists he studied as an undergraduate; an attention to nature born of farm living and a love of walking; and finally, travel and the love of history it instills. Noticeably absent, however, are poems about birds; the Romantics, particularly Keats; and the technical and stylistic range he would display in later collections.
Stafford’s most prescient observation about Plumly’s work is that everything is “held firmly in language . . .” Plumly’s belief in the ability of language to preserve or resurrect what is loved, lost, past, or forgotten is a distinguishing feature of Plumly’s poems. “What is experience except its words?” Plumly asks in Against Sunset (2017). Indeed, what is anything except its words?
As co-editor and fellow poet David Baker notes in the introduction, the Collected Works features 286 poems, plus nine new poems. Baker also includes a short biography and identifies three main features of Plumly’s work: his development of the prose lyric, the pervasive influence of poet John Keats and the Romantics, and Plumly’s matchless “style,” defined by Baker as “language’s palpable expression of personality, of values, of stance, and of the music of one’s own sense of being.” The “music of being” is what I believe Stafford is referring to when he writes that Plumly’s work “exhilarates the reader.” It’s the exhilaration of experiencing the poem as a living entity, one lifted from time while also being immersed in time, an eternal present of “all at once” in Kenneth Patchen’s words, that is witnessed, then carefully set down on paper by Plumly.
Plumly specified that the poems be organized in reverse chronological order. “Spots of Time,” one of the new poems, leads off the collection, with the eight other new poems closing it out. “Spots of Time,” is a literal “re-collection” of Plumly’s poetic concerns—family, history, rain, the dark, loss—all carefully witnessed and rendered. But a reader sees that—from end to beginning, in this case—the poems become more expansive and complex as Plumly masters his craft.
“Spots of Time” is followed by thirty poems from Middle Distance (2022) that range from lyric prose to the narrative lyric to shadow sonnets (poems or sections of 14 lines that don’t follow the traditional rules of the sonnet) to a hybrid form of both. These poems are much less restricted than Plumly’s earlier work; however, they still resonate with insight and wisdom, as in “Travel & Leisure,” where Plumly uses the conditional tense to catch what Chris Smither, in one of his songs, calls “that little known dimension / the taste of endless time”:
I’d have walked the late afternoon through
the well-ordered, well-kept deep green
gardens, have found a table near the front
of where the fountain was, and watched
the evening turn blue and dark and darker.
No one died, nor was ever going to die.
Or the poem’s last stanza, about a John Constable painting, which captures how art— including poetry—escapes linear time:
It’s the warmth, the all-embracing texture
of the sheer application of the paint itself
that loves us, the point of each brushstroke
palpable at once in two worlds: his at the
Dedham/Bergholt/Hampstead source,
ours in our simply standing there looking
at the art for as long as ever in our eyes.
What Baker doesn’t mention about the collection is evidence of Plumly’s recursive approach to writing poems. Plumly, like his friend Galway Kinnell, was “an inveterate reviser,” and the collection features earlier poems that Plumly later reworks—the reasons for which may provide a future Ph.D. candidate with a compelling dissertation topic. A representative example is the vast change from Old Heart’s “The Morning America Changed” to Against Sunset’s “Limited Sight Distance.” Both poems recall the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, and both follow the same general sequence of events. Yet they could not be more different. “The Morning America Changed” is tightly composed of twenty-six lines, the majority of which describe the scenery on a walk from the Villa Serbelloni to the town of Bellagio, on the shores of Lake Como. Conversely, “Limited Sight Distance” is a prose poem, almost a lyric essay of sorts, that features twenty-two sections that meander through the same account as leisurely as the two who take in the view as they walk toward town. Here’s how each poem begins:
From “The Morning America Changed”
Happened in the afternoon at Villa Serbelloni.
We’d closed up shop on the work for the day
and decided to make the long descent down
the elegant stone switchback path into Bellagio
for coffee and biscotti. It was still Tuesday,
near a quarter to three, and a good quarter hour
to the exit gate . . .
From “Limited Sight Distance”
The afternoon we’d finished up early, at about two-fifteen, and decided, since it was a particularly pristine day, to make the long descent into town. Maybe to get coffee, shop, whatever. We were fifteen minutes getting ready, and
it would take fifteen minutes more to reach the exit gate.
Both have a casual, “just another day” beginning, but already the first sounds clipped, tense, while the second is more relaxed. The poems also treat the speaker’s memory of the attack quite differently.
From “The Morning America Changed”
. . . I was looking skyward on Via Garbaldi,
the one-way traffic lane circling the town,
when I heard the rain in the distance breaking
and then a voice through the window calling
and then on the tiny screen inside
pillars of fire pouring darkly into clouds.
From “Limited Sight Distance”
A loud TV voice started coming from the coffee bar nearby. The sound had clearly been turned up. / . . . I followed the voice, then there it was: a grand glass tower on fire, with equally billowing gray-black clouds working their way a few floors from its top. On the modest screen it all seemed smaller than it was, like special effects. I remember that, and remember that I wasn’t certain where it was happening . . . / Planes run into mountains, I thought, not buildings.
It’s almost as if the approach of the first poem wants to highlight the surprise of the attack, while the second captures more the confusion, the feeling of unreality. Also the first poem ends abruptly with those “pillars of fire pouring darkly into clouds,” while the second one goes on for another 12 sections. Both poems are effective, but I confess I prefer the second for its tone and the generous space it gives to the whole experience. Other poems, too, are refashioned or completely revised: Middle Distance’s “We Insomniacs” being an amplification of a section of Against Sunset’s “Mortal Acts” and many sections of “Spots of Time” being revisions of earlier poems.
Plumly’s outstanding early poems are included here: “Out-of-the-Body-Travel,” “After Rain,” “Posthumous Keats,” “Cedar Waxwing on Scarlet Firethorn,” and “In Passing”—which contains a signature Plumly gesture: “There is almost nothing that does not signal loneliness, / then loveliness, then something connecting all we will become.” But The Marriage in the Trees (1997) and the three subsequent books that contribute the greatest number of poems to the collection: Old Heart (2007), with 43; Orphan Hours (2013), 43; and Against Sunset, 33, demonstrate most fully the features that Baker identifies: the lyric poem’s narrative values, the influence of Keats and other poets, and the stylistic forms that Plumly perfected that forge a whole that is greater than its parts.
The poems from these four books astonish with their range and virtuosity. Along with the habits of birds, the attributes of specific trees, and a wealth of examples of how a poem’s emotional narrative is achieved, Plumly addresses the subject of poetry itself by resurrecting a holy host of nineteenth and twentieth century poets.
Those mentioned include W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, A. E. Housman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Lowell, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, and at least a dozen others. Other poems, sadly more plentiful toward the end of Plumly’s life, focus on a particular poet. In “For Gerald Stern at Ninety-Two,” Plumly describes a party for Stern’s eightieth birthday, where Plumly, Galway Kinnell, and fifty other guests, in honor of Stern, rise and recite Dylan Thomas’s “In My Craft or Sullen Art”* as if it were an official poetic anthem, then records his own emotional response:
. . . And I have to say I wept and still
weep when I think about that moment that I can
hardly even speak of now at a distance of some
dozen years—time, “in the mercy of his means,”
refusing to let go of the “secret heart” of poetry.
But to me, the most powerful poems relate to the deaths of William Matthews, Plumly’s fellow poet, and long-time friend; and Deborah Digges, Plumly’s wife from 1985‐1993, who fell to her death, ruled a suicide, in 2009. What strikes me about these poems is Plumly’s turning away from Eliot’s modernist “theory of impersonality,” which dictates that the biographical details of the poet’s life should be disregarded when exploring the poem’s “greater meaning.” These poems are about devastating loss, however, and Plumly seems to intuit that the “greater meaning” can be reached only through a deeply personal expression of grief.
William Matthews died of a heart attack on November 12, 1997, one day after his fifty-fifth birthday, in the Manhattan apartment where Plumly often visited him. He and Plumly had much in common besides their poetic calling: both were from Ohio, both had been married more times than friends could remember, both suffered heart attacks, and both published eleven books of poetry during their careers.
Plumly’s poems about Matthews are rich with intimate detail. “William Matthew’s Armistice Poppies” published in The Marriage of the Trees the year Matthews died, is an insider’s nod to Matthews’ birthday, which takes place on Veteran’s Day. “Bill’s Hangover” displays a remarkable familiarity with Matthews’ “morning after” routine, including the inveterate smoker’s craving for “a quantum taste of ash.” And in “When He Fell Backward into His Coffin,” Plumly cites the rumors surrounding Matthews’ death and then knowingly corrects them: “. . . The truth is he was resting / on the edge of an empty tub, fully dressed, / every cell, body and soul, beginning to annul / every future cell.” The most heart wrenching image, however, occurs in “Turn, Counterturn, Stand,” where no mention is made of Matthews until Plumly recalls the graves of his parents:
When I think of them I think of my friend with no one
there those hours he had to suddenly lie down and
listen to his pulse.
The thought of a loved one dying alone without anyone there is perhaps the most haunting and painful experience after a loss, universal in its reach.
Plumly’s poems relating to the death of Deborah Digges are less straightforward than those about Matthews, no doubt due to the complications of a romantic relationship. Some poems are easily identified: “With Deborah in Amherst” or “One in Ten,” about Deborah’s childhood and family, or a section in “Travel & Leisure” that reads ”When / Deborah jumped, for instance, she / must have thought that what was under / her was water willing to love her / the way she was loved by so many.” But others, like “With Stephen in Maine” depicting Plumly with Digges’ young son at the beach, or “Suicide” and “Souls of Suicides as Birds,” both of which allude to Digges’ death, take a more obscure approach. These poems, to quote Plumly, give both the poet and readers “Something to think about, an abstraction, / like being . . . ” They also capture the distressing distance and denial that one can experience after a great loss.
Most oblique, however, is “Vesper Sparrow,” for which Plumly borrows both the idea and the poem’s title from Digges. Married to Plumly at the time, Digges chose Vesper Sparrows as the title of her 1986 award-winning collection and the vesper sparrow as the bird to “carry her soul” beyond death. Plumly’s later “Souls of Suicides as Birds” is inspired by that idea. Then in “Vesper Sparrow,” he writes that Digges later changed her mind, choosing instead the redwing, the same bird he ends up choosing for himself. Thus Plumly, in emulating and amplifying her work, forges a bond between the two poets, one that reveals a remarkable admiration for Digges and her work, as well as expressing a devastating sorrow over her loss.
In the Collected Works, both Matthews and Digges, as well as Plumly’s immense circle of family, friends, and fellow poets are resurrected on the page, returning them to life through memory, attention, and language. As such, the book is an immense testament to the life-affirming and life-sustaining power of poetry.
Kate Fox is the author of The Company Misery Loves (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions) and two poetry chapbooks: The Lazarus Method (Kent State University Press) and Walking Off the Map (Seven Kitchens Press). Her work has appeared in Great River Review, Kenyon Review, New Ohio Review, and Pleiades, among others. She earned her Ph.D. in American literature/creative writing from Ohio University, where she worked as an instructor, editor, and assistant to the president. She also served as editor of the Ohioana Quarterly book review journal from 1999‐2007. She lives in Athens, Ohio, with her partner, Bob DeMott, and their two English setters.
Kate Fox’s The Company Misery Loves, was published by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions in June 2024. Information about the book, including how to order, can be found here: https://sheilanagigblog.com/shop-sheila-na-gig-editions/kate-fox/
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