Stanley Plumly's poetry focuses on psychological dramas involving those people and events--an alcoholic father, a long-suffering mother, a series of failed marriages--central to his life. These figures and experiences haunt the poet's inner self, creating a darkness reflective of the human and natural worlds beyond the self. Plumly's first book, In the Outer Dark (1970), bears an especially appropriate title, for it suggests the relationship of the writer's two worlds: the somber realities of the outer world force the poet into the equally harsh, equally dark recesses of his own inner world. Giraffe (1973) further clarifies Plumly's central subject--the artist and his aesthetic process, the poet's attempts at love and marriage, the son's relationship with his father. Out-of-the-Body Travel (1977) reveals a narrowed but even more intense field of vision. This book concentrates almost exclusively on the separate figures of the writer's mother and father, suggesting as well the ways in...