Special Guest Book Review

In recognition of National Poetry Month, we have a special guest book review from Dr. Jesse Graves, Professor and Poet in Residence at ETSU. He began teaching at ETSU in 2009, after completing a PhD at the University of Tennessee. Dr. Graves is the author of three poetry collections, Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine, Basin Ghosts, and Specter Mountain, co-authored with William Wright. Dr. Graves received the 2014 Philip H. Freund Prize for Creative Writing from Cornell University and the 2015 James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. In 2015, he was inducted into the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame.

Dr. Graves reviewed The Collected Poems of Stanley Plumly, the definitive collection of one of the most celebrated poets of his generation and a master of the lyric poem in its richest, most flexible registers.

"When the poet Stanley Plumly passed in 2019, America lost one of our finest artists of the lyric poem. During his celebrated career, Plumly published more than a dozen collections of poems, and four books of prose on literary history and the craft of poetry. He was a poet of memory, of birds and trees, and of life in the small towns of the Appalachian region of southeastern Ohio. Plumly was also known as a great teacher and mentor to poets, and for me he represented a link in the chain of my own poetic lineage. He was a teacher to one of my teachers, mentor to Arthur Smith, who later become my “poetry guru” when I was a student at the University of Tennessee.

Plumly wrote about love, nature, and memory, often all woven together in a single intricate poem. In addition to these timeless themes, Plumly explored how poems work, how they make us feel, and what they might remind us of, as in “The Art of Poetry,” where he wrote:

No apologies, no explanations

A few words strung together on a line,

A tolerance of inches off the wave.

A radio wave, invisible though

Audible, like a lake held in the hand,

The bright stone skipping the surface gone home. (p. 268)

The image of a lake held in the hand resonates like Emily Dickinson’s image of the brain being “wider than the sky.” Both take a small part of the body and connect it through analogy to something much larger and more expansive. One of the best poems I know on the early passing of a parent is his “For My Father, Dead at 56, on My 56th Birthday.” In this poem, the speaker reckons with the shadow cast by his larger-than-life father, a thread Plumly began in his early poem, “Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me.”

Plumly was the first poet I ever saw give a public poetry reading and to answer questions in a discussion with students. I am sure that he visited UT because of his connection to my old professor, Dr. Smith, who introduced Plumly as one of the finest poets of his generation. I was tickled when I overheard another faculty member say that Plumly was “devastatingly handsome.” I still remember getting up my nerve to ask him a question: “If you write about the things you care about the most, how to keep from writing the same poem over and over again?” I will never forget his answer, which was, “I dare you to try.” He said that it was nearly impossible to write the same poem twice, because the circumstances surrounding the writing of poems are always different and always changing. I am glad to say that I have found this to be absolutely true to my experience across three decades of writing poems.

Plumly was an accomplished literary critic and historian. He published books on British Romantic poets and painters, and on the craft of poetry. This subject matter occasionally appears in his poems, in beautiful meditations like "Keats in Burns Country," and "Constable's Clouds for Keats." The best of Plumly's poems are surely his reflections on childhood, such as "The Boy on the Step," and "Above Barnesville," as well as his poems of love and heartbreak, like "The Marriage in the Trees," and "Summer Celestial." Plumly wrote his poems from “the deep heart’s core,” as William Butler Yeats called it. For a reader discovering Plumly's work for the first time, any of these poems would be a great place to start, and for a student of the art and craft of poetry, there isn't a single page in The Collected Poems that doesn't offer some lesson in style, imagery, or the special kind of music from words masterfully aligned that only poetry can make."