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Poet's Choice

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while higher up, placed between the olives and the pears,

valerian and cyclamen -- then views of "little villages

grouped among the cliffs, hanging over the sea,"

the blue-eyed Mediterranean: all of it, to Montale,

imprisonment, a "counter-eloquence" of the mind at noon,

the sealed heart almost too deep for the sun. Summer's

language like sunlight on stone, light itself the stone.

The interplay between words and reality, mortal imagination and the lasting world, shimmers in these poems.

(Stanley Plumly's poems "Hermeticism" and "Keatsian" can be found in his new book "Old Heart: Poems." Norton.

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