After a diagnosis of cancer, acclaimed poet Stanley Plumly found himself in the middle distance-looking back at his childhood and a rich lifetime of family and friends, while gazing into a future shaped by the press of mortality. In Middle Distance, his final collection, he pushes onward into new territory with extended hybrid forms and revelatory prose pieces. The result is the moving culmination of a long career, a work of fearless, transcendent poems that face down the impending eternal voyage. Plumly populates this collection with tender depictions of poets, family, and friends-the relationships that sustained him throughout his life-as well as unflinching self-portraits. In "White Rhino," for instance, he adopts the voice of the "last of [his] kind," using the rare creature as a canvas to depict the dying, aging poet himself. In "Night Pastorals," he writes vividly and movingly about being on his deathbed, with fragmentary impressions of the other side. In profound lyric narratives, Plumly reaches out to a past that feels closer than ever, returning to the Ohio of his childhood and the shadows of a country at war. Blending documentary and memoir with his signature Keatsian lyricism, Middle Distance contemplates at every turn the horizons of Plumly's life.

On December 28, 1817, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon hosts what he refers to in his diaries and autobiography as the immortal dinner. He wants to introduce his young friend John Keats to the great William Wordsworth and to celebrate with his friends his progress on his most important historical painting so far, Christ s Entry into Jerusalem, in which Keats, Wordsworth, and Charles Lamb, also a guest at the party, appear. After thoughtful and entertaining discussions of poetry and art and their relation to Enlightenment science, the party evolves into a lively, raucous evening. This legendary event will prove to be a highlight in the lives of these immortals.

A beautiful and profound work of extraordinary brilliance, The Immortal Evening takes this dinner as a lens through which to understand their lives and work and to contemplate the immortality of genius."

Stanley Plumly explores immortality in art through the work of two impressive landscape artists: John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. Seeking the transcendent aesthetic awe of the sublime and reeling from personal tragedy, these painters portrayed the terrible beauty of the natural world from an intimate, close-up perspective. Plumly studies the paintings against the pull of the artists' lives, probing how each finds the sublime in different, though connected, worlds. At once a meditation on the difficulties in achieving truly immortal works of art and an exploration of the relationship between artist and artwork, Elegy Landscapes takes a wide-angled look at the philosophy of the sublime.

After a diagnosis of cancer, acclaimed poet Stanley Plumly found himself in the middle distance-looking back at his childhood and a rich lifetime of family and friends, while gazing into a future shaped by the press of mortality. In Middle Distance, his final collection, he pushes onward into new territory with extended hybrid forms and revelatory prose pieces. The result is the moving culmination of a long career, a work of fearless, transcendent poems that face down the impending eternal voyage. Plumly populates this collection with tender depictions of poets, family, and friends-the relationships that sustained him throughout his life-as well as unflinching self-portraits. In "White Rhino," for instance, he adopts the voice of the "last of [his] kind," using the rare creature as a canvas to depict the dying, aging poet himself. In "Night Pastorals," he writes vividly and movingly about being on his deathbed, with fragmentary impressions of the other side. In profound lyric narratives, Plumly reaches out to a past that feels closer than ever, returning to the Ohio of his childhood and the shadows of a country at war. Blending documentary and memoir with his signature Keatsian lyricism, Middle Distance contemplates at every turn the horizons of Plumly's life.

On 28 December 1817, Benjamin Robert Haydon hosted what he refers to in his diaries and autobiography as the "immortal dinner". He wanted to introduce his young friend John Keats to the great William Wordsworth and to celebrate his progress on his most important historical painting so far, Christ's Entry into Jerusalem, in which Keats, Wordsworth and Charles Lamb, also a guest at the party, appear. After thoughtful and entertaining discussions of poetry and art and their relation to Enlightenment science, the party evolves into a lively, raucous evening. This event will prove to be a highlight in the lives of these immortals. A beautiful and profound work of extraordinary brilliance, The Immortal Evening takes this dinner as a lens through which to understand the lives and work of these men and to contemplate the immortality of genius.

Orphan Hours is a book of reconciliation, of coming to terms with time in its most personal and memorable manifestations, and of learning the wisdom of what cannot be changed. The urgency of the elegy has been absorbed by an acceptance of the detail, texture, and small moments that constitute and enrich mortality.

from Lapsed Meadow"

I remember, in Ohio, fields of wastes of nature, lost pasture, fallow clearings, buckwheat and fireweed and broken sparrow nests, especially in the summer, in the fading hilltop sun, when you could lose yourself by simply lying down. Who will find you, who will call you home now, at dusk, with the dry tips of the goldenrod confused with a little wind, filling in what s left of the light."

John Keats's famous epitaph-"Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water"-helped cement his reputation as the archetype of the genius cut off before his time. In this close narrative study, Stanley Plumly meditates on the chances for poetic immortality, an idea that finds its purest expression in Keats. Incisive in its observations and beautifully written, Posthumous Keats is an ode to an unsuspecting young poet-a man who, against the odds of his culture and critics, managed to achieve the unthinkable: the elevation of the lyric poem to sublime and tragic status.

"New Hope for the Dead: Uncollected Matthews" is the last of poet William Matthews' posthumous collections, following "Search Party: Collected Poems" (Houghton Mifflin) and "The Poetry Blues: Essays & Interviews" (University of Michigan Press), all edited by son Sebastian Matthews and close friend and fellow poet Stanley Plumly. "New Hope for the Dead" features the best of Matthews' remaining uncollected work, including over 30 poems spanning Matthews' prolific but tragically cut-short career. But unlike the first two collections, "New Hope for the Dead" features Matthews' unheralded talents as a short story writer, food writ

The amnesia that surrounds our earliest life is not only a great human mystery but also a receptacle into which is poured by the baby's relatives the beginnings of a life story. In later years these relatives can look at the grown child and see their first observations confirmed, for was he not always a curious baby, a cranky baby, a calm baby, what have you? We come into the world swaddled in the beginnings of a story, and, by the time we begin remembering and tending it, it already has a shape and a momentum. When I was born, in 1942, my young parents were following my father's naval orders around the country--Bremerton, Washington; Norman, Oklahoma. I spent many of my first months with my father's parents in Cincinnati. There are photographs of me in, of course, a sailor suit. The lawn at the back, or western side, of my grandparent's house had a few huge trees--could they have been oaks?--and I think I remember standing at the edge of that lawn, on a kind of flagstone patio, in the late-afternoon light, staring excitedly and contentedly at the effect the tall trees and their long shadows made. The world seemed vast and full of comfortable mystery, and yet I was but a few feet from the safety of the house. But that would have, of course, been later, when I was four or maybe even six. I stood there often. And, of course, I've seen photographs of the lawn and house. And maybe I'm recalling some older relative's anecdote about a boy at the edge of a lawn that somehow, inexplicably, has got blended into my own memories, like vodka slipped into a bowl of punch. My earliest memory seems to be from the back yard of my mother's mother's house in Ames, Iowa. There's a sandbox, a tiny swatch of grainy sidewalk, and--there! it's moving--a ladybug. I have tried again and again to construct a tiny narrative from these bright props, but they won't connect. They lie there and gleam with promise but won't connect. \ls\ The war ended, my sister Susan was born, my father took a job with the Soil Conservation Service in Ohio, and then the four of us were in a boxy farmhouse outside Rosewood, Ohio, for a year and then moved into a house just outside the city limits of Troy, Ohio. The smells of that house, that life, those years, I absorbed all unthinkingly, as greedily and easily as breath. Later, thinking back fondly on them, I at first organized them easily: indoors and outdoors, female and male. Coffee, dishwashing liquid, baking are foremost among the kitchen smells, and the braided scent of misty heat and faint scorch that meant ironing. I remember, too, coming home from school during the Army-McCarthy hearings to find my mother ironing glumly, fascinated and appalled by what I now know to call the self-righteousness and swagger and mendacity of the whole gloomy circus. Once or twice--I think I remember this correctly--she was weeping a little. A child's world is small. Think how easily I wrote the war ended earlier. I don't remember it myself. In 1945 I remember I suddenly had a sister. I saw in the kitchen those puzzling afternoons how the cruelty of the official world, the world that history records and by whose accounts I knew to write that the war ended, could come into the house and linger, itself a sort of odor.

In this collection, Stanley Plumly confronts and celebrates mortality--in the detailed natural world, in the immediacy of the loss of friends, and in personal encounters. Archetypal, sometimes even allegorical, the poems in Old Heart amount to a sustained meditation. The American Academy of Arts and Letters declared of Plumly that "he has in the last thirty years quietly, steadily, expanded the range of lyric poetry in English... and] reinvigorated our poetry." His ethical rigor and literary modesty combine in Old Heart--his finest book of poetry.

In this prize-winning collection, a debut poet evokes his childhood as the son of missionaries in Papua New Guinea.
Mission Work is an arresting collection of poems based on Aaron Baker's experiences as a child of missionaries living among the Kuman people in the remote Chimbu Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Rich with Christian and Kuman myths and stories, the poems explore Western and tribal ways of looking at the world -- an interface of vastly different cultures and notions of spirituality, illuminated by the poet's own struggles as he comes of age in this unique environment.
The images conjured in Mission Work are viscerally stirring: native people slaughter pigs for a Chimbu wedding ceremony; a papery flight of cicadas cuts through a cloud forest; hands sting as they beat a drum made of dried snakeskin. Quieter moments are shot through with the unfamiliar as well. In "Bird of Paradise," a father angles his son's head toward the canopy of the jungle so the boy can catch sight of an elusive bird.
Stanley Plumly, this year's guest judge, writes, "How rare to find precision and immersion so alive in the same poetry. Aaron Baker's pressure on his language not only intensifies and elevates his memories of Papuan 'mission work, ' it transforms it back into something very like his original childhood experience. Throughout this remarkably written and felt first book, the reader, like the author himself, 'can't tell if this is white or black magic, ' Christian, tribal, or both at once."

Orphan Hours is a book of reconciliation, of coming to terms with time in its most personal and memorable manifestations, and of learning the wisdom of what cannot be changed. The urgency of the elegy has been absorbed by an acceptance of the detail, texture, and small moments that constitute and enrich mortality.

from Lapsed Meadow"

I remember, in Ohio, fields of wastes of nature, lost pasture, fallow clearings, buckwheat and fireweed and broken sparrow nests, especially in the summer, in the fading hilltop sun, when you could lose yourself by simply lying down. Who will find you, who will call you home now, at dusk, with the dry tips of the goldenrod confused with a little wind, filling in what s left of the light."

In his new collection, Stanley Plumly confronts and celebrates mortality in the detailed natural world, in the immediacy of the loss of friends, and in personal encounters. Archetypal, sometimes even allegorical, the poems in Old Heart amount to a sustained meditation. The American Academy of Arts and Letters declared of Plumly that "he has in the last thirty years quietly, steadily, expanded the range of lyric poetry in English... and] reinvigorated our poetry." His ethical rigor and literary modesty combine in Old Heart his finest book of poetry."

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?