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Poet's Choice

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death is the great divorcer forever."

In his marriage of the poem to matter,

written in stone if written in water.

"Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water" is the phrase Keats asked to be inscribed on his headstone. Those words written in stone are a brilliant paradox, reflecting the young poet's awareness that he might -- or might not -- be the kind of artist we call "immortal." Plumly's tribute has a similar quality of quiet depths, something like a sublime wryness.

Paradox and the relation between enduring stone and fluid life also characterize Plumly's meditation on the great Italian modernist Eugenio Montale:

HERMETICISM

The tiering up the hillside, the tearing up, too,

from so much sunlight, so much man-made beauty.

Marianna, Montale's sister, describes the family villa

as a sequence of gardens, multiples of trees,

and staircase after staircase climbing -- masses of sage,

broom, and white and yellow flax, and palms mixed in

with poplars, holly oaks, (lemons), and candle-lit magnolias,