Against Sunset

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.

"For decades now, Stanley Plumly has extended, refined, and amplified the Grand Tradition of the lyric poem in English. He crafts his poems with a jeweler’s precision, but they are also informed with an almost-leonine urgency and passion. This degree of artistry is sadly rare in contemporary poetry, and it allows him to bear, always with nobility, the losses and rueful reckonings that are forced upon us in our twilight years. These poems recall the later Stevens and the later Yeats—and to say this is high praise indeed. Against Sunset is a collection by a contemporary master."