Orphan Hours
“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.

1106502038
Orphan Hours
“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.

17.95 In Stock
Orphan Hours

Orphan Hours

by Stanley Plumly
Orphan Hours

Orphan Hours

by Stanley Plumly

Overview

“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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780393346626
Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date: 10/07/2013
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 112
Product dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Stanley Plumly (1939–2019) was the author of numerous collections of poetry including In the Outer Dark (1970), winner of the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award, and Out-of-the-Body Travel (1978), nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Other works include Giraffe (1973), Summer Celestial (1983), Boy on the Step (1989), The Marriage in the Trees (1997), and Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me: New and Selected Poems, 1970–2000 (2000), Against Sunset (2017), and the posthumous Middle Distance (2020). His collection Old Heart (2009) won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Paterson Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. He authored four works of prose: Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography (2008), which was named runner-up for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography; The Immortal Evening: A Legendary Dinner with Keats, Wordsworth, and Lamb (2014), which received the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism; Elegy Landscapes: Constable and Turner and the Intimate Sublime (2018), and Argument and Song: Sources and Silences in Poetry (2003). Plumly was a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland as well as Maryland’s poet laureate from 2009 to 2018.

Table of Contents

Lapsed Meadows 17

The Crows at 3 a.m. 18

The Jay 21

My Lawrence 23

Cancer 26

Lost Key 28

On Deciding Not to Be Buried but Burned 35

Four Hundred Mourners 37

Look for Me 39

Verisimilitude 41

Glenn Gould 42

Cello 43

Umberto D. 45

The Best Years of Our Lives 47

Vesper Sparrow 50

Afterward 52

Wistman's Wood 54

On Dartmoor 56

Arbitrarily 59

Perspective 61

Blind 63

Ground Birds in Open Country 66

Amidon Christmas Tree Farm Cardinal 68

I Love You 70

Sitting Alone in the Middle of the Night 71

John 20 72

Dayton 75

Nature 80

Nurture 82

As Reported 84

The Day of the Failure in Saigon, Thousands in the Streets, Hundreds Killed, A Lucky Few Hanging On the Runners of Evacuating Copters 86

Black Walnuts 88

From the Window of the Quiet Car 90

The Sand 92

Canto XVIII 94

Imaginary Prisons 99

Human Excrement 100

Caravaggio's Conversion 101

At Seventy-one 102

Orphan Hours 103

Dusk Coming On Outside ___, New York 106

The Lost Wine 107

On the Beach at Duck 108

On the Lawn at the Forians 109

Leavings 110

Dedications 111

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Related Subjects

Poetry
American Poetry
21st Century American Poetry
American poetry->21st century
Poetry
American Poetry
21st Century American Poetry
American poetry->21st century

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