One Man's Dark
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
"Maurice Manning displays not just terrific cunning but terrific aim." —New York Times Book Review
"Manning's genius—his truly staggering genius—is in his ability to put this ancient question into a true American idiom, to make this fundamental human inquiry both vividly, heartbreakingly poignant and madly, idiosyncratically his own." —Smartish Pace
"He's saved himself with the most basic of things—a place, its people, and one of its songs." —Orion
Pulitzer finalist Maurice Manning is at the height of his powers as he searches through layers of dreams, imagination, and memory to reconnect with oneself and one's place in the cosmos. Drawing deep from his Kentucky roots, Manning's poems are peopled with ordinary and extraordinary rural characters, as he gives voice to a region well-loved and full of tradition.
From "Something to Say about Possums":
I've taken so many backward steps,
I have believed history
can be explained, only to learn,
like sin, it can't. How I've needed more
and more forgiveness! I've needed grace,
and followed it into a dream
of green and yellow light coming
from a-way on high, maybe a mountain.
Maurice Manning is the author of five previous books of poetry, including The Common Man, a 2011 Pulitzer Prize finalist, and Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions, winner of the 2000 Yale Younger Poetry Series Award, selected by W.S. Merwin. A Guggenheim Fellow, he currently teaches at Transylvania University and is on the permanent faculty of Warren Wilson College.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Manning (The Gone and the Going Away) further draws from his Southern roots in his sixth collection, sketching ever more elegant pastorals of the Kentucky countryside. This setting gracefully comes alive as the corporeal and the spiritual combine: "between God's thumb/ and famous, animating finger." The verdant flora provides evidence of divine creation and the call of a woodcock becomes an answer to a subliminal prayer. Manning is at his best in quiet moments of stunning lyricism, describing his view from a hill as "a dark, less risen place, as if God/ left out the leavening to leave/ an uninviting place alone." There is a deep reverence for the ancestral spirit of the land, as if Kentucky's rich hills and flowing streams were a part of its residents' DNA. Manning plumbs the past for his eclectic cast of characters: almost implausibly rustic overall-clad shoeless brothers plucking banjos; a man named Shadrach Creech who lived in a hollow tree; and another banjo player, named Sam-Dude, who warily advises the poet to be skeptical of a neighboring clan. There is even a brilliant allegorical poem about the righteousness of toil. Manning's verse resonates with the plaintive loneliness of his rural landscapes and the divine presence that alleviates that loneliness, be it God, one's forebears, or poetry.
