Out-of-the-Body Travel

Stanley Plumly won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award for poetry with his last book, In the Outer Dark. This one, a long sojourn into the poet's Ohio childhood in the 1940s, is equally well-crafted. Most of the poems are written in distilled vernacular, and if they are sometimes slightly prosy, they're accessible and never pedestrian. On the contrary, the poems shake up images fixed in memory, and probe them: the picture of Plumly's mother, for example--standing in the doorway in summer, calling his name--recurs compulsively, evoking sometimes terror, sometimes a suffocating sense that the past can't be relived. The same is true of other memories of his family: the poet records a long-gone moment when his father fell drunk to his knees on the porch, and, in a poem called ""Iron Lung,"" imagines that he himself is forever trapped in that position. Plumly is sentimentally attached to these atmospheric scenes from childhood, but he is also repelled by the larger-than-life, enshrouding quality their particular images possess: ""My whole body is a lung; I am floating/ above a doorway or a grave."" The poems are not spectacular; when they stop being descriptive, they often take the tone and diction of an incantation or a prayer. But they are sustained in thrust and skillful, and merit a careful reading.