Orphan Hours
Poems
8 November 2013
Territory Rights — Worldwide.
Description
“Combines stateliness, formal beauty and emotional urgency in rich and musical tapestries of language. . . . Every poem . . . is masterful.”—Washington Post
Orphan Hours is a book of reconciliation, of coming to terms with time in its most personal and memorable manifestations, and of learning the wisdom of what cannot be changed. The urgency of the elegy has been absorbed by an acceptance of the detail, texture, and small moments that constitute and enrich mortality.
from “Lapsed Meadow"
I remember, in Ohio, fields of wastes of nature,
lost pasture, fallow clearings, buckwheat
and fireweed and broken sparrow nests,
especially in the summer, in the fading hilltop sun,
when you could lose yourself by simply lying down.
Who will find you, who will call you home now, at dusk,
with the dry tips of the goldenrod confused
with a little wind, filling in what’s left of the light.
Reviews
"Plumly is a master of tone. His ‘I’ is not noisy, not flashy, not there to steal the show. The ‘I’ of his poems is intent on seeing something other than the self: bird, sky, tree, leaf. . . . Each poem invites you.”" — Dallas Morning News
"Not to be missed." — Library Journal
Also By: Stanley Plumly 
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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
Middle Distance: Poems
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Middle Distance: Poems
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A probing and commanding final volume from a master poet facing his own mortality.
Middle Distance: Poems
E Book, 2020
The probing, commanding final volume from "one of contemporary America’s most gifted and influential lyric poets" (David Baker, Kenyon Review).
Elegy Landscapes: Constable and Turner and the Intimate Sublime
Hardback, 2018
A sweeping look at the lives and work of two important English Romantic painters.
