Collected Poems of Stanley Plumly

One of the California Review of Books' Best Poetry Books of 2025

The definitive collection of one of the most celebrated poets of his generation and a master of the lyric poem in its richest, most flexible registers.

Stanley Plumly is one of the most emotionally complex, sustaining, and influential American poets of the last fifty years. Born in 1939, Plumly wrote poems that explored the deep interiors of the human heart and mind against a wide backdrop of cultural and historical events. Profoundly personal yet socially astute, his work is both descriptively exact and allusive, engaging nature and art as well as family and friendship.

For the two years before his death in 2019, Plumly worked with David Baker and Michael Collier, this book’s two editors, to make preparations for the present volume. This Collected Poems contains nearly three hundred of his poems—including nine new, previously unpublished ones—and stands as a permanent archive of Plumly’s achievement in verse.

As Plumly wished, Collected Poems does not categorize the poems by individual volume but presents a continuum of his lyric accomplishments. This book bears his gifts and his specific blessing, embodying his wish to offer his poems in reverse chronology, tracing back from the present to the very origins of his aesthetic. In every way, it is the book Stanley Plumly wanted to be remembered by.

Collected Poems gathers the full range of Plumly’s talent as it charts the development of his unique and enduring contribution to the American lyric. The volume stands as a tribute to Plumly’s artistic vision and will be welcomed by his many readers now and in the generations to come.