Search results for ""author stanley plumly""

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.

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A window onto the lives of the Romantic poets through the re-creation of one legendary night in 1817.

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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.

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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.

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Winner of the 2001 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. "Barot’s mature linguistic skills really come down to a metaphorical and musical intelligence that refuses to value one element over another, that will not let the language or the longing take over."—From the Foreword by Stanley Plumly "This is a book of lyric wonders: wit that turns dark, darkness that blazes up again in music and story."—Eavan Boland Rick Barot is currently Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University. He was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended Wesleyan University, the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, and Stanford, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow in Poetry.

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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.

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