Christina Mullin

Stanley Plumly (eds. David Baker and Michael Collier)
Collected Poems of Stanly Plumly
W. Norton and Company
August 12, 2025
480 pages; $39.95

 

“you have to stand at a real middle / distance just to see me”:

Reading in and through Collected Poems of Stanley Plumly

 

Stanley Plumly’s Collected Poems gathers together an essential body of work, influential and memorable for its ongoing development of poetic form and practice. Spanning the 50-year career of the renowned poet, essayist, and teacher, it contains the poems of Plumly’s eleven collections as well as nine excellent new pieces, a total of 286. The poems engage the historical and political, the lives and work of writers and artists, the characters of landscapes, and the poet’s own interiority. They range from the associative lyric, varieties of the deep image and post-confessional styles, various combinations of poetry and prose, along with extraordinary meditations formed of unique hybrids of literary biography, history, ekphrasis, and landscape.

David Baker’s excellent introduction provides several valuable contexts and footholds of insight, including a major lifelong contribution of Plumly’s work, his innovative strategies for “turn[ing] the narrative toward a more associative, leaping, incantatory effect— that is, toward the meditative” (xxiv), such that “a poem is not either narrative or lyric” but “a proportion of both, on a sliding continuum rather than a bipolar, absolute line” (xxv). The shifting ground between these approaches opens surprising, complicated gaps between modes of perception and understanding.

The compelling poetry that arises also roots in a deeper, ongoing dialogue across the existential boundary in consciousness. Plumly extensively engaged with this phenomenon in the poetry and reflective letters of Keats, particularly his identification of living a “posthumous existence,” by which he indicated the change in consciousness after self-diagnosing his tuberculosis. This awareness intertwines with Keats famous conception of “Negative Capability” or the capacity for “being in uncertainties” (xxvii).

While the avid reader of poetry will continually discovery formal nuance and innovation in these pages, many of us, regardless of our level of investment in the critical study of poetry, are living a posthumous existence as well. We live the divide and dialogue between our daily, experiencing perspective and our “posthumous,” self-aware, reflective self, producing insight, value, connection, and context as it mourns. Such readers will find in Plumly’s forms, subjects, and expressions a complex, engaging mirror and guide of their own awareness.

We find Plumly’s engagement with “negative capability” at the very core of one of his fundamental devices, the image. The woven associations of “Meander” begin, “Yes, a river is a tree, a tree a river, built by source and branchings” (202). We don’t yet know why, but we know we are in a gap here, similar to the famous rabbit-duck illusion. Which is the image, which the comparison?

The poem continues via associative leaping or overlapping between the interconnected images. To meet each unfolding uncertainty, the reader must reorient, in the process discovering a new synapse of connection:

 

each divided limb finding shape
inside the air, like this rain slip-slipping down the window, capillary, fragmentary,
bled and bleeding out, a kind of river delta, spreading like the root-like
veining of the heart or ganglia of nerve cells off the spine,
the spine itself a slight meander, rooted to the ground, branching to a cloud,
my heart, my spine, my cloud, the X- rays coldly spiritual, the invisible made visible.

 

The overflow of interwoven images links tree, river, larger ecosystem, and the human body, each additional clause adding emotional intensity as the single sentence continues its own flow of rightward branching. The winding, branching single sentence, like the opening dual image, contains multitudes. Experientially, we no longer need to understand how we ended up in the gap of uncertainty with which the poem opened. Intuitively, we know all of these things are connected; the poem’s form and deeper wisdom remind us of our own instinct for deep fluidity and connectedness to our world. The ending extends this mystery into the future, beyond one death, through ongoing consciousness: “That loving shape of the limb on the dying elm, how far from where it started, / still growing, even now, toward ending, the way a river and its runoff end” (203). Having stepped outside of life, perceiving its miraculous symmetries and interdependences, “posthumous” consciousness returns to its root awareness of the individual mortality that set it apart in the first place.

Although stylistically very different, Plumly’s post-confessional pieces also tap into his intuitive sense of “negative capability,” often regarding the experiential sources of inner division that can foster such sensitivity. “Infidelity” offers a fine example of his ability to balance a poignant narrated scene, that of his father pushing the mother out of his car as he abandons the family, with objective insight that also applies to the reader’s self-reflective life, especially its linguistic manifestations:

 

One of those moments we give too much to,
like the moment of acknowledgment of
betrayal, when the one who’s faithless has
nothing more to say and the silence is
terrifying since you must choose between
one or the other emptiness. I know
my mother’s face was covered black with blood
and that when she rose she too said nothing.
Language is a darkness pulled out of us.
But I screamed that day she was almost killed,
whether I wept or ran or threw a stone,
or stood stone-still, choosing at last between
parents, one of whom was driving away. (308)

 

The “posthumous” thoughts weave the father’s betrayal into the son’s, an archetypal story that balances the shrill pain of the narrated scene. The two modes of understanding collide in the objective sentence, “Language is a darkness pulled out of us.” On one level, this calls attention to the very inability of consciousness to structure a pure narrative of the particular pain from which it has grown. However, as readers, we also experience the mysterious pathos of Plumly’s scene merging with our shared inability to overcome the deeper realization he meets in the telling. We apprehend the deep uncertainty between our memory’s need for a narrative to form it into something comprehensible and our psyche’s need to mesh memory with an identity that functions in our family and society.

Realizing the role of language in attempting to mirror interior life uncannily releases the speaker’s own lived reflection of the archetypal experience of betrayal, “choosing at last between / parents.” This lyric gesture stirs the feeling of the reader’s inner life in correspondence with the understanding in the objective line. The combination deepens this felt apprehension well beyond our ability to empathize with the story of a traumatic experience. The interplay between the narrative drive to order experiences causally and/or chronologically and the lyric’s self-reflective thought and feeling opens the poem’s liminal space between the “posthumous” and once-experiencing aspects of the poet, through which archetypal depth and individual experiences inform one another.

The uncertainty within narrative serves often in Plumly as the very opening to the “posthumous” perspective, which enters through measures of lyric expression. The opening comparisons between experiences of memory in “Alzheimer’s” also loosely correlate with the apparently stable narrative and Plumly’s his own dynamic comprehension, incorporating the lyric aspect, which he evokes as a “long view” of “the nice houses that like the trees / along the street also diminish in perspective, / like those who live inside them, like us” (52). The self-reflexive movement of the image returns awareness of mortality to the afterlife self-state from which it arose, opening to a corollary uncertainty about the limits of poetry and memory of offer lasting dignity to the literally deceased:

 

Like the friendly neighbor walking toward the camera
who gets lost in all the shadow and bright detail,
and if we could remember her young face,
first name, let alone her heart, that might or might not
be enough to justify my childhood hallway poetry,
its classrooms and star windows,
and the patience with which we’d stand in line
after a practice fire alarm, regardless of the season,
then file back in to climb back up the worn
but certain stairs to where the sunlight was waiting.

 

The tonal shift between the austere “justify” and self-aware tenderness of “my childhood hallway poetry” opens a chasm within the speaker’s self between the living maker of poems others will judge and the “posthumous” witness of a departed soul. The empty space within offers its own mirror of the lost “friendly neighbor” in the transformative “death” of the speaker’s own childhood assumptions of self, community and place as stable. Importantly, through these interconnections, possible only through acceptance of the instabilities within our identities and perceptions, we do perceive the sunlight again in memory. We feel with the speaker that eerie sense of returning to something changed in our own having lived beyond it into a concurrency of perspectives.

Showing a range of tones through which to experience and evoke this plural perspective, poems like “Summer Celestial” embrace the dual fates of uncertainty and interconnectedness with an ecstatic affirmation of life per se:

 

I wake up weeping, and it is almost joy.
I go outside and the sky is sea- blue, the way the earth is looked at
from the moon. And out on the great surfaces, water is paying
back water. I know, I know this is a day and the stars reiterate,
return each loss, each witness. And that always in the room next door
someone is coughing all night or a man and a woman make love,
each body buoyed, even blessed, by what the other cannot have. (353)

 

Plumly’s ekphrastic meditations form similar webs of interconnectedness to his lyrics through an inverted method, foregrounding his experiences as a viewer of others’ perspectives as manifested in paintings. “Middle Distance” interprets the cognitive and emotional states of painters according to a triangular relationship between the figurations and spaces within the work itself and his own sense of how the work sees “him” and arranges his perspective as an audience:

 

Constable is aging, failing.
He thinks I’m a cloud, a long white body
lying in the air over Hampstead, he thinks
clouds of storm shapes are bodies, like great elms.
I’m his anomaly, still thinning out.
Another day he sees me lying down
undulant in the middle distance, the
cloud come at last to earth as the earth is
part of the corn, the good ground under corn,

 

the painting piecemeal, the way he paints, so
that you have to stand at a real middle
distance just to see me. (9)

 

The elm forms an interesting association with “Meander,” where a branch also evoked the ongoing life of the poem in the reader, except here the speaker and reader have changed positions. Discussion of the “middle distance” between the two positions metaphorically invests the technical term with implications for the ways in which we, as viewers, continue the life of consciousness once inhabited by painters—including the eerie sense that they might have intuited “us” viewers as audience years before our times. Interdependent with this connective understanding are deeply empathetic impressions of the painters’ own self-transformations within the process and visions of their work, a deep mirror for poetic consciousness.

Importantly, these impressions also proceed “piecemeal, the way he paints,” creating a mimetic effect on the reading process which deepens the connective movement from painter to viewer to speaker to reader. In a fascinating tangled hierarchy, the “posthumous” nature of this interplay enmeshes the speaker himself: “I’m his anomaly, still thinning out.” The concluding gesture, in which the speaker equates himself with both the “boy’s / possible future” and the surrounding context of the painting, completes the strange loop of connective uncertainty:

 

And I am the water.
And the light on the water. And if it
is possible, having also been of
the plowed and planted and replanted earth,
I am the sky domed over the boat boy’s
possible future, when he then arrives
and puts to work all that really matters. (9-10)

 

Like the painters in the poem, the speaker becomes a place of ongoing life, living, having lived by engaging with it in practice, making dynamic imagistic reflections of it. The transformation we witness in these lines corresponds with an overarching achievement in Plumly’s work: These poems, through multiple formal modes, succeed in transforming the terrifying awareness of mortality, of “failing,” into a bridge of empathic and cognitive exploration, across which personal and subjective experiences may find resonance with readers or viewers. The speculative synergy with the image—the painting, in this case—welcomes the future from this place of uncertainty, which balances the reconstructive narrative of the viewer’s experience of the painting with the artist’s reimagined life. Plumly teaches us that the destabilizing effects of uncertainty on personality and identity correspond directly with its capacity for transformation—and with the capacity of such transformation to transcend the individual life in question. Indeed, on one level, the speaker’s intuitive self-locations in the paintings teach us to read the poems themselves. We find ourselves first in identification with one perspective or feeling, then another, the movement towards a “real middle distance” engaging, self-reflective, and inspiring.

In limited space, it is impossible to feature each of Plumly’s considerable innovations and discoveries, his many contributions to the practice and study of poetry. This review has foregrounded his work in the deep image, post-confessional, meditative and ekphrastic approaches. Noteworthy within each are Plumly’s dialogical shifts and balancing between experiencing and “posthumous” modes of consciousness. His variety of styles opens these turns and transformations to take many forms: from one view of an image to another, from narrative to meditative lyric moment, from considering the life of a painter to considering life from within the painting.

Yet, these achievements, remarkably are only part of his legacy, or, rather, they speak to only one audience of it. These poems are also accessible to a broad readership, who need not be involved in the study of technique to experience their mystery and enrichment. Nor will the reader’s unexpected experiences of insight and self-reflection while engaging with Plumly’s movements of consciousness require it. After all, the paradox subtly evoked in many of these poems is that uncertainty is not merely the factual ground and center of our world—It is also what intervenes to ransom us from the habitual constructions of our own minds, a miracle this collection offers in poem after poem.