Skip to content
Home/ Middle Distance: Poems
Middle Distance: Poems

Middle Distance: Poems

by Plumly, Stanley
No customer reviews yet ISBN 9780393882490

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.

About the author

Product details

Pub dateJan 25, 2022
ISBN-100393882497
ISBN-139780393882490
LanguageEnglish
Last updated 2025-06-28 03:44
$12.05 $16.95 28% off
You save $4.90 · list price $16.95
In stock soon — order now to reserve your copy
Delivery by Thursday, October 8, 2026
Qty
Sign in to Add to Saved list
Free delivery on orders over $35.
15-day returns. Any reason.
Secure checkout. We never store card details.

Readers who bought this also bought

More from Poetry | Subjects & Themes | Death, Grief, Loss
See all
Stressed, Unstressed: Classic Poems to Ease the Mind
<p><strong>Can you be re-lit by poetry? This little book offers everyone one of the oldest of all remedies for stress: the reading of poetry.</strong></p><p>Intended to help you endure some of your stressful moments and painful experiences, these poems tell us we are not alone. Returned again and again over the centuries by great imaginations are love and death and memory - remembrance of childhood joy, of happy days and beautiful places, of loved ones we have lost or feeling at peace and at one with the natural world. 'Stressed Unstressed' harvests an array of poems on such themes in the hope that they will speak to you when you are processing your worries or when you simply want to fill your mind with different, more positive thoughts.</p><p>Words can act as drugs, and on the bedside or in a waiting-room this little volume of poetry can help in all sorts of difficult circumstances. So here is a selection of new poems and old, enduring classics and forgotten gems. Next time you are feeling stressed or anxious, worried or sleepless, panicky or unable to cope, 'Stressed Unstressed' invites you to read a poem and join the thousands of others who have read and remembered and loved these poems - to form a very special community. This is bibliotherapy.</p>
$9.31
Summer Snow: New Poems
Hass, Robert
$15.08
World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes on
Choi, Franny
$19.70
Good Grief
Pastor, Brianna
$15.54
Radicle, or When the World Lived Inside Us: Poems
Catudal, Stephanie
$14.16
Bright and Borrowed Light: Poems
Kampa, Courtney
$18.32