Middle Distance: Poems (Paperback)

Middle Distance: Poems By Stanley Plumly Cover Image

Middle Distance: Poems (Paperback)

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The probing, commanding final volume from "one of contemporary America’s most gifted and influential lyric poets" (David Baker, Kenyon Review).


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.



Stanley Plumly (1939–2019) authored eleven books of poetry, including the National Book Award finalist Old Heart, and four books of nonfiction. His honors include the Paterson Poetry Prize and Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, among others. Plumly was a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland as well Maryland’s poet laureate from 2009 to 2018.
Product Details ISBN: 9780393882490
ISBN-10: 0393882497
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Publication Date: January 25th, 2022
Pages: 96
Language: English
A gracious and candid reflection.
— Ron Charles - Washington Post

Wry, self-deprecating; prosaic in the best of ways…yet also deeply precise and memorably poetic.
— Ryan Asmussen - Chicago Review of Books

The intense lyricism of [Plumly’s] verse inevitably shapes and can even transform its readers.
— Jacqueline Kolosov - Los Angeles Review of Books

[A] valedictory collection of one of our most big-hearted and thoughtful poets.
— David Rigsbee - Cortland Review