Stanley Plumly

Old Heart: Poems

Stanley Plumly

• 2007 LATimes–Poetry winner
• 2007 NBA–Poetry finalist
• Score: 16.57

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.

Search Party: Collected Poems

William Matthews, Sebastian Matthews, Stanley Plumly

• 2005 Pulitzer–Poetry finalist
• Score: 6.55

When William Matthews died of a heart attack in 1997, the day after his fifty-fifth birthday, America lost one of its most important poets, one whose humor and wit were balanced by deep emotion, whose off-the-cuff inventiveness belied the acuity of his verse.

With Search Party, his son Sebastian and his friend and fellow poet Stanley Plumly have brought together a collection drawing from all of Matthews’s previously published work as well as twenty-three never-before-published poems. Here are meditations on relationships, work, family life, and, of…