Stanley Plumly (1939–2019)

This is an uneven book of poems. At his best, Plumly writes in a lyrical voice with an eye attuned to nature. He can write in a variety of meters and can use off-rhymes on occasion to pull his lines together. However, at least in this collection, he has an odd habit of wearing his allusions on his sleeve. So he has lines that begin with "Eliot says..." or "Keats wrote..." I don't know if it's an anti-modernism--instead of burying your allusions, you broadcast them--or some other sort of show more stylistic choice, but too often it makes his lines sound awkward. It also feels a bit like name-dropping to show off his erudition. Plumly should be comfortable enough in his career not to need the latter, so all I can assume is that it is a stylistic feature that fails as often as it works. show less

Hmmm... hard to review this one. It was different, interesting. I wish the focus had been solely on the conversation between artist Haydon and poets Keats, Wordsworth, and Lamb, but it kept jumping around from the "immortal evening" when all were present to other places and times and artists who seemed to have nothing to do with that evening. It was incredibly repetitious, yet left many questions unanswered. I felt the book gave me the same info (a subjective POV of the author) repeatedly show more but left out so many realities. Interesting facts, but you had to dig for them. show less

I suppose that any anthology of contemporary poetry is going to be uneven in quality, but I think this one suffers from pedestrian poetry more than others. There are some interesting poems, but very few "new" discoveries (for me), and so that made the volume disappointing.

These are the kinds of poems I do not like. Awkward constructions, twisted odd metaphors, minimal punctuation, dense imagery all prevent me from enjoying this book of poetry. Unfortunately, the poems he read were not in any of the books he had for sale – at least none in the ones I bought sound even vaguely familiar.

Maybe the poet, reading this kind of poetry, knows where the commas should be. But the casual reader is lost. I read a couple I mildly liked, but most of these were less than show more enjoyable. 2 stars

--Jim, 12/31/10 show less