Against Sunset: Poems

A powerful new volume from the National Book Award finalist that demonstrates how the lyric is essentially elegiac.

Whether addressing the deaths of friends and other poets or celebrating the closing of the day and the autumn of the seasons, Against Sunset reveals Stanley Plumly at his most personal and intimate. As much an homage to the rich tradition of the Romantics as it is a meditation on memory itself, these poems live at the edges of disappearances.

From “Against Sunset”

The horizon, halfway disappeared between above and below—

night falls too or does it also rise out of the death-glitter of water?

And if night is the long straight path of the full moon pouring down

on the face of the deep, what makes us wish we could walk there,

like a flat skipped stone?