In "Field," a key poem in his most recent collection, The Marriage in the Trees (1997), Stanley Plumly presents a defining statement about himself as a man and a poet: "A man of sense, coming to a clearing, a / great open space, will always wait among the trees, in the / doorway, until the coast is clear." This guarded stance results from Plumly's more than thirty years as a poet who has focused on psychological dramas involving people and events central to his life--an alcoholic father, a long-suffering mother, and a series of problematic, often failed, love relationships and marriages. Plumly's poetry embodies a quest to resolve these conflicts and to move to exposed, open spaces of the heart and mind after reconnoitering from the doorway of memory.

Increasingly, the poet's chief concern is the how and why of memory, how and why exercising memory and writing poetry are virtually...