Stanley Plumly's many awards include the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Delmore Schwartz Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, the Academy of American Poets Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2010 he was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Orphan Hours is his eleventh book of poems. He is currently a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. (Author photo by Elizabeth Stevenson)
Orphan Hours is a book of reconciliation, of coming to terms with time in its most personal and memorable manifestations, and of learning the wisdom of what cannot be changed. The urgency of the elegy has been absorbed by an acceptance of the detail, texture, and small moments that constitute and enrich mortality.
"[Plumly is] a modern elegiac poet, successor to James Wright and John Keats, with a marvelous ear for the music of contemplation."
—Rita Dove
"These new poems share the remarkable moral poise, philosophical calm, and lyric intensity that have always distinguished [Plumly's] work. Yet in this family album dedicated to those who have been lost, there is an even more compassionate if grave beauty, an even greater foliate delicacy to every act of memory. Drawn from life's passage, Orphan Hours is Stanley Plumly's masterpiece."
—David St. John
W. W. Norton
