Against Sunset

by Stanley Plumly

Overview

A powerful new volume from the National Book Award finalist that demonstrates how the lyric is essentially elegiac.

Whether addressing the deaths of friends and other poets or celebrating the closing of the day and the autumn of the seasons, Against Sunset reveals Stanley Plumly at his most personal and intimate. As much an homage to the rich tradition of the Romantics as it is a meditation on memory itself, these poems live at the edges of disappearances.

From “Against Sunset”
The horizon, halfway disappeared between above and below—
night falls too or does it also rise out of the death-glitter of water?
And if night is the long straight path of the full moon pouring down
on the face of the deep, what makes us wish we could walk there,
like a flat skipped stone?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393253948
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	11/08/2016
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.70(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.

Table of Contents

I

Dutch Elm 3

Brown Fields 4

With Deborah in Amherst 7

Dream 10

Love Poem 11

Variation on a Line From Elizabeth Bishop's "Five Flights Up" 12

Terminal Insomnia 13

Jack Gilbert 15

Crashing at Bill's After My Class at NYU, Two Bottles of Italian Red, Real Stilton and Some Brie and Almost Stale Saltines 17

Mortal Acts 18

To Autumn 20

Beauty 22

II

Red Brick 25

My Noir 27

The Sleeping Dogs of Erice 32

Travel in the Afterlife 34

Nineteen Species of Sandpipers - Sibley 35

Seasonal 36

Thanking Friends for the Art of Ornithology 40

Shelley's Arrogance 41

Paul Guest Addresses his Apple with a Stylus 43

Manhattan 46

Aspects of the Novel 47

Early Nineteenth-Century English Poetry Walks 48

III

Too Broad a Brush the Field Guide to the Natural World of Washington, D.C. 63

Suicide 65

Limited Sight Distance 66

Poliomyelitis 72

Interrogating Matthew 5-8 73

Within The Hour 74

Lost Then Found Photograph of My Parents 75

At the Picture Window 76

Radio 78

A Moment for Maurice Sendak 79

Elegy 81

Against Sunset 82

References 83

Editorial Reviews

"The elm, the brickwork, the late-night bottle of wine with a friend, all that you have ever wished to store against oblivion: may these be blessed with light of the sort that emanates from every page of Stanley Plumly’s newest book. The poems are sonnet-haunted, even those that bear no trace of eight-and-six, with such deep courtesy do they honor the intelligence of form. I go to Stanley Plumly’s poems as they go to the past, to be taught how I ought to live."

Linda Gregerson

"For decades now, Stanley Plumly has extended, refined, and amplified the Grand Tradition of the lyric poem in English. He crafts his poems with a jeweler’s precision, but they are also informed with an almost-leonine urgency and passion. This degree of artistry is sadly rare in contemporary poetry, and it allows him to bear, always with nobility, the losses and rueful reckonings that are forced upon us in our twilight years. These poems recall the later Stevens and the later Yeats—and to say this is high praise indeed. Against Sunset is a collection by a contemporary master."

David Wojahn

10/01/2016
Striving to communicate the ephemerality of human experience and perception "in an octave between moment and memory," Plumly's 11th collection (after Orphan Hours) draws inspiration from the Romantics—Keats, most notably—and recently deceased poet contemporaries such as Jack Gilbert and Galway Kinnell. Like them, Plumly scans nature for instances of clarity and enlightenment: "the kind of honesty you want to join/ so completely the heart disappears, or, exactly the other way,/ is enlarged." His poems illustrate the dilemmas of discernment ("Hard to tell/ what looks like the stillness/ of a bird from the outline of a leaf") while suggesting that our interpretations of what we see are personal decisions that can make all the difference in how we live. VERDICT These plainspoken poems of melancholy introspection and their attentiveness to traditional subjects—landscapes, weather, memory, mortality—will appeal most readily to readers who appreciate old-school poetic values.—Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY

Library Journal