Against
Sunset
Poems
by Stanley Plumly
W.W.
Norton & Company
www.wwnorton.com
500
Fifth Avenue
New
York, NY 10110
ISBN:
978-0-393-25394-8
84
pages
$25.95
Cloth
Review
by Dennis Daly
Stanley
Plumly hobnobs with dead people – romantic poets, contemporary poets, and
personal relations. Whether citing real or imagined incidents from diaries or
first-hand memories evoked from his past life, Plumly uses his verses to delve
into the meaning of mortality and the mystery of life itself. He gently sorts
out the strange draws and the nagging fears inherent in that “good night,” and
explores those inclinations with a lyricism that mesmerizes his undaunted
readers.
Two
exquisite, airy pieces act as bookends to this collection. The opening poem,
Dutch Elm, celebrates a suburbia of the mind, the dreamy paths leading to a
mnemonic self-nullification. Plumly uses the majestic elm trees of his past
life as his metaphoric, solace-delivering vehicle. The protective canopy of
these trees shelter the poet’s most intimate moments and his deepest sorrows, a
reality that shadows him like an afterlife. Here’s the lyrical heart of the
poem,
I
miss in particular the perspective looking down
the
distances of all those Elm named streets disappearing
into
dusk, the last sun turned the stained blue of church windows.
I
miss standing there, letting the welcome dark make me invisible.
I
miss the birds starting to sleep, their talking in their songs becoming
silent,
then their silence. I even miss not standing there.
Against
Sunset, Plumly’s title poem and the last piece in this impressive collection,
extols the half-light of rising and setting suns. Speed matters as life lines
up against the backdrop of horizon and sunset. The word “Against” in the title
seems to take on an alternative meaning devoid of negativity. Plumly links the
fall and rise of death and birth in his concluding lines,
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? I’ve seen the sun-path poured at dawn
on
the flat other side of the country, but it was different, the yellow
morning
red with fire, the new day’s burning hours oh so slowly climbing.
Within
the depths of this book, many of the poems center on certain dead poets. In
Mortal Acts Plumly reminisces about Galway Kinnell in a lovely narrative with a
heartfelt point. But the real interesting part happens on the way to the
aforesaid point. Here’s a taste of Plumly’s irony,
You
hadn’t been there long, the job
at
Binghamton meant traveling by bus
or
driving to the center of the state
where
the noir-in-color painter Edward
Hopper
had once made lonely art of
Depression
downtown buildings bleaker
than
the rail yards and B&O freight cars.
In
the end you couldn’t do it, drive or take
the
bus, be that tired again, so you won
the
Pulitzer and efficiency apartment
that
goes with full professorships at nearby
NYU,
as close as you could get to home
in
faraway Vermont.
Replete
with multiple caesuras in the form of dashes, Plumly’s To Autumn, which he
bases on letters from John Keats to Richard Woodhouse and John Hamilton
Reynolds, chronicles Keats’ poetic walks that served up the heavily-misted landscapes
for that poet’s piece Ode to Autumn. Plumly
knows whereof he speaks—he has written a book on John Keats. The poet fastens
many of Keats’ insightful quotations together with explanatory phrases and
connective words. The process works spectacularly well. The poem opens this
way,
A
walk along the water meadows by the playing fields
of
the college—a mile-and-a-half to the hospice
of
St. Cross—a walk he takes almost every day
in
the “pleasantest town I was ever in,”
including
a Sunday named for the sun cutting angles
with
its scythe, when it strikes him just how beautiful
the
season has become here at the end of summer,
the
gathering of light, the harvest coming in,
“chaste
weather—Dian skies… a temperate sharpness.”
He
writes Reynolds that he “never liked stubble fields
so
much as now…
Keats’
aforementioned letters were written a year and a half before his death.
Set
in the heart of this collection, Plumly’s thirteen-section poem, Early
Nineteenth Century English Poetry Walks, amazes with its mosaic of famous lives
pieced together by a twenty-first century denizen not unfamiliar with pastoral
romance. Keats appears again, as does William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, essayist Charles Lamb, Thomas
Chatterton, and others. The constant movement of these artists in their
walkabouts mimic their imagined realities and their romanticized fates. Each of
the thirteen poetic sections is thirteen lines long. How unlucky! Section 11
explores the very nature of these walks. Consider these lines,
Walks.
Coleridge walks, at his best, through
abstraction thick as glass,
toward
what Hart Crane calls “an improved infancy,” both his sons’s
and
his own. There is no stopping Coleridge. Shelley, “borne darkly,
fearfully,
afar,” tries to walk on water, “far from shore.” Keats,
in
the thousand days before the end, walks in ever-closing circles
Sounds
a bit like an academic exercise, doesn’t it? Well, it’s not. Plumly seems to
know exactly what he’s doing. He has reached back into the nineteenth century
and grabbed hold of these melancholic constructions of country landscape, which
have been disused in our new century, sets them in place, and then employs this
context as a framework to his contemplation of mortality. Plumly then weaves
his own personal contacts and concerns into this emotional panorama. The poetic
consequences of these strategies both enlighten and comfort readers of this subtly-layered,
rewarding book.
