Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me: New and Selected Poems, 1970-2000

Selecting from six collections spanning 30 years, this well-focused collection starts off with new poems and works backwards, forming a single unbroken arc that nicely maps Plumly's poetic obsessions: a drunk father, avine fauna and city vagrants, and meditations on larger-than-life figures like Keats and friends like William Matthews. A pre-modernist aesthetic predominates, moving through a gamut of forms from blank to metrical verse, and the whole is suffused with an elegiac tone that is always credible if rarely surprising. Most of the poems stick to hushed description; earlier ones, like ""For Esther"" or the title poem, are more willing to make additive leaps: ""There is no star in the sky of this room,/ only the light fashioning fish along the walls./ They swim and swallow one another."" At least two poems (""Souls of Suicides as Birds"" and ""Cedar Waxwing on Scarlet Firethorn"") join birdsong to human grief in an ecstatic swoon: ""before the trees--/ to be alive in secret, this is what/ we wanted, and here, as when we die what/ lives is fluted on the air."" Plumly's poems are, without exception, exceptionally well-made, though the pathos-of-my-labors that drives poems like ""Complaint Against the Arsonist"" (""This pyrrhic fire the barn burned down and blew back/ into the dust-weight of its carbon barn I spent the summer part-time painting "") can seem a little shopworn. Often enough, however, something ravenous emerges, as in the free-verse ""Woman on Twenty-Second Eating Berries,"" a poem that weaves together many of Plumly's leitmotifs. There, the title persona feasts on ""Poor grapes, poor crabs,/ wild black cherry trees, on which some forty-six/ or so species of birds have fed, some boy's dead/ weight or the tragic summer lightning killing/ the seed."" (June)