The marriage in the trees

Melodic and firmly rooted in nature, Stanley Plumly's The Marriage in the Trees deepens and sharpens the themes of his critically acclaimed Boy on the Step. In this, his seventh collection, Plumly renders the worlds of past and present with a taxonomist's care - what Italo Calvino called exactitude. He moves from the pastoral to the familial, from the landscapes of Turner and Constable to blasted industrial sites, from defining moments of acute personal loss - particularly the death of his parents - to meditations on the death of Keats and evocations of Whitman tending the wounded on the bloody battlefields of the Civil War.