‘Against Sunset’: visionary’s eye, humanitarian heart | Arts And Entertainment

Stanley Plumly is one of America’s most esteemed poets. For decades, he has gifted the world with his absolutely gorgeous poetry. With his new collection, “Against Sunset,” Plumly combines a visionary’s eye with a humanitarian heart. These are luminous poems that offer both redemption and pleasure to the careful reader. These densely written poems demand our full attention and reward us for our effort. An expert on the life and poetry of John Keats, Plumly is boldly erudite as he entertains us with his knowledge of Keats and those who knew him. Plumly’s poems are flawlessly crafted and infused with the most necessary ingredient of all: human passion.

Plumly’s generous capacity for compassion comes to the forefront in “With Deborah in Amherst.” This is a poem about Deborah, a woman in great mental anguish. The poem opens with Deborah’s tears “Out of the blue, out of the marble blue/of her eyes, the sudden tears” and continues with a stressful car ride past Emily Dickinson’s house. As they drive past Dickinson’s, Deborah’s pain assumes a life of its own:

If fear is a cover word, pain is a better word,

a blood word, that cuts like paper or a clean razor.

It wasn’t tears exactly, or only, but her body

breaking open the whole hurt length of it,

as if , in that moment, she’d halved her heart,

the mind, in that moment, now a body all its own.

Plumly goes on to describe the continued anguish of Deborah. Her pain leads him to ask a question about the origin of such pain:

Where does it begin — long-suffering sorrow?

It builds a house and over years begins to tear

at it, brick by eaten brick, as ice eats

the ground, and the ground turns back into a field.

In another poem, “Jack Gilbert,” Plumly recounts his one and only meeting with the poet Jack Gilbert at Daniel Halpern’s New York apartment. In this poem, Plumly expresses sincere admiration for Gilbert:

speaking to another silence or otherwise

communities of spirits, Gilbert’s is

somewhere in between. He lived on islands

of his own making. White islands

in waters crystalline. His obit quotes

a friend that Gilbert was our ‘greatest

living poet,’ a large and loving claim,

which we all are, ditto, until we’re dead.

In a later poem, “Beauty,” Plumly describes a breathtaking winter scene. In “Suicide,” Plumly meditates on both the desire for and the rejection of suicide. In “Limited Sight Distance,” he remembers where he was on the fateful day of September 11, 2001. He then recalls an image of his father dying in a poem called “Within the Hour.” The volume concludes with the title poem, “Against Sunset.” In this poem, Plumly gives a resounding yes to life as he describes dawn: “the yellow morning red with fire, the new day’s burning hours oh so slowly climbing.”

As a whole, Stanley Plumly’s “Against Sunset” affirms the remarkable journey called life. Plumly’s poems are elegant, radical, and sublime. This precise and beautiful book is a testament to the genius of its creator. Among poets, Plumly is as peerless as he is ardent.