Reviewed by Joanna Pearson
9.13.07

Stanley Plumly’s seventh collection of poetry, Old Heart, is the sort of meditative confrontation of mortality that only an older poet could write—particularly, in this case, an older poet who recently experienced a heart attack and who is currently finishing up a Keats biography. Hearts, in many forms, pop up throughout this collection, and while Keats himself is referenced directly, it is birds (often Keatsian stand-in-for-the-immortal-soul birds) that dominate the psychic landscapes. Overall, this collection of poetry is mellow and accomplished, measured and never showy.

Birds abound in the pages of Old Heart. Even when a poem is not specifically about birds, a bird will creep in through some comparison. And when birds grow wearisome, he expands to include butterflies for good measure. Plumly is knowingly engaged in considering the bird both as a symbol freighted with great spiritual weight, appropriate to any book preoccupied with mortality, and as a straightforward element of the natural world. The butterfly and bird show up together in the poem “Nostalgia,” in which Plumly quotes Pound:

“The natural
object is always the adequate symbol,” though
Pound doesn’t say if the symbol by itself is
adequate. The imagination makes from not up.
Which, in his recent essay on the subject,
“Reading Poetry,” the critic Robert Scholes
seems sort of to agree with, that discovery
not invention is what brings the text to life…(l. 8-15)
…Yet he would certainly
have seen the bird grounded on one wing
before the butterfly; truth, then beauty. (l. 37-39)

Lest it seem, however, that Plumly might collapse his natural symbols beneath the weight of literary criticism, it’s worth noting that his most vivid and eye-popping poems handle birds on a more literal level, as in this one called “Birding:”

Some had the throats of sunsets,
some a pond’s gray-blue, some had thumbnail necklaces,
some the white of paper or ink from the glass inkwell.
Then you had to cut them if only in order to count them,
there at the sunset, the still pond or the necklace,
the whistle of a voice whose windpipe was a reed. (l. 1-6)

In other poems, Plumly writes with similar beauty and nostalgia about magpies, blue jays, cardinals, herons, pigeons, wrens, and, for the reader for whom things need to be made explicit, “spirit birds.” Much like Keats in “Ode to a Nightingale,” Plumly seems to find his great soul symbol in the bird, but birds in all their varieties are a bittersweet reminder of the changing seasons of the natural world he fears leaving.

Plumly writes with a knowing, often-wry quality throughout this book. In his poem, “Simile” he finds a heart-shaped stone on the shore, and then proceeds to play with the comparative associations for a number seaside finds (including, of course, birds.) The self-consciousness can verge on being too much at times. At other times, however, it works, as in a poem Plumly’s archly titled, “‘The Morning America Changed’.” What follows is a poem in which the author and his wife go for afternoon coffee and biscotti in Italy on September 11, 2001. The quotidian afternoon coffee somehow captures the magnitude of what has happened back in the U.S. far more powerfully, albeit indirectly. Indeed, Plumly proves himself most trenchant in the indirect approach, as with “Greensboro Campus Sonnet.” This poem merely describes a college campus in springtime and a young couple kissing—and yet unlike some of Plumly’s more stately meditations on mortality, this poem has an elegant truth to it and doesn’t threaten to sink under its own weight.

Old Heart is a measured, technically accomplished book of poems. Rarely does the poems surprise or offer the flashy, delectable turn, but these poems do seem to open up with repeated readings. Old Heart is meant for the slow burn, the prolonged savor, not the one-time glance. And sure, every now and then, the reader may find him or herself wondering if all these birds and hearts aren’t a bit too much—but then again, if it means lines like this stunner, “the dark cardinal weight of his light heart doubled,” then maybe it’s proof that Plumly’s poetic instincts are on point.