Synopses & Reviews
Pulitzer finalist Maurice Manning returns us to the beloved and lamented lives and landscape of the hill people of his native Kentucky. In the great tradition of E. A. Robinsons Tilbury Town, Mannings The Gone and the Going Away brings to life the mythical “Fog Town Holler,” where men have “funny names” like “Tiny Too” and “Eula Loom,” and theres a fox named “Redleg Johnny.” While the real world that “Fog Town Holler” represents has almost disappeared, Manning is able to recapture it by moving beyond his own boyhood impressions of the Kentucky hill country and its people to discover “the way things used to be/…the scrape of the grass/ in the wind, the butterfly drinking/ the thistle top.” The discoveries are so powerful and clear that he conjures up his “grandmother, wearing a dress/ carrying a hoe by its neck.” “Lawse,” she exclaims, “the sun cant hardly find this place!” The great magic of Mannings poetry not only allows him to find “this place,” but also, in beautifully controlled verse, to bring it vividly into the present where, as Manning hopes, it “shall never suffer removal.”
Review
"This fourth book by Yale Younger Poet's Prize-winner Manning is, like his previous books, a unified sequence . . . The poems are friendly, if also full of sadness. . . . Readers will find themselves charmed by Manning's smart, companionable voice." —Publishers Weekly
"Maurice Mannings fourth collection of poems, The Common Man, brings the tales and idiom of a sort of American Robert Burns, a rough-hewn Appalachian experience thats comedic and exuberant, sly and pointed as it works its way around what Manning calls ‘the big ideas. James Dickey used to say he wanted to write ‘country surrealism and meant the tales, as strange as they are cultural reflections, that come with fireside talking. And, oh yes, singing. Manning has big talents and none are more impressive than his singing, a word much overused when speaking of poets. I think few will disagree this is memorable music, entertaining, rich, often spooky-wise. The Common Man marks Maurice Manning as a most uncommon poet." —Dave Smith, author of Little Boats, Unsalvaged
"The Common Man is Maurice Mannings homage to a way of being human that has all but vanished, but he has the lyrical powers and the gumption to resuscitate and carry it—in tetrameter couplets, on a voice that seems, at once, of another era and utterly contemporary: bawdy tales, philosophical questions, jokes, prayers—the hearts truth. This is country in the way that Twain and Faulkner were country, and if you miss the high art of it all or the elegiac underpinning, check your pulse. This ones for the ages." —Rodney Jones, author of Salvation Blues
Review
PRAISE FOR BUCOLICS
"The natural world in these poems is a figure familiar and lush, yet unknowable and everywhere meaningful."American Poet
Review
PRAISE FOR A COMPANION FOR OWLS
"The lucidity and surprise and soulfulness of [the poems] language embody an intelligence and sensibility attainable only in high art . . . This is thrilling work." JAMES BAKER HALL, POET LAUREATE OF KENTUCKY
PRAISE FOR MAURICE MANNING
"A fresh and brilliant talent." W. S. MERWIN
Review
Manning celebrates the virtues of nature and finds deep gratitude for the mysterious hand that created it all.
Review
"[Manning is] the literary guardian of a way of life he feels is vanishing from small-town Kentucky and America... [“The Gone and the Going Away”] maintains his fidelity to rural themes, recapturing a lost world for readers to remember and preserve....Although Manning has been lauded throughout the country for his work — garnering accolades from some of the major poets of our time, like W.S. Merwin, in addition to the numerous awards he has received — he has found his place in this literary life, wearing it now as effortlessly as the patterned chambray shirts he favors. He is a man of the people, intent on bringing poetry and scenes of rural beauty to them, words of the past, but also the present — the poetry of preservation, of all of us."—Jason Howard,
Leo Weekly "I'm no smarty-pants about poetry, but I do like words and I like good folks. It took just two lines into the opening poem in Maurice Manning's collection called The Gone and the Going Away, and I knew I was headed for some good words about interesting folks. . .This collection is a world I expect to dip into regularly."—Julie Isgrigg, Indie Fresh Press
Review
PRAISE FOR THE POETRY OF MAURICE MANNING
"A fresh and brilliant talent."-W. S. Merwin
Synopsis
The Common Man, Maurice Mannings fourth collection, is a series of ballad-like narratives, set down in loose, unrhymed iambic tetrameter.
Synopsis
The Common Man, Maurice Mannings fourth collection, is a series of ballad-like narratives, set down in loose, unrhymed iambic tetrameter, that honors the strange beauty of the Kentucky mountain country he knew as a child, as well as the idiosyncratic adventures and personalities of the oldtimers who were his neighbors, friends, and family. Playing off the books title, Manning demonstrates that no one is common or simple. Instead, he creates a detailed, complex, and poignant portrait—by turns serious and hilarious, philosophical and speculative, but ultimately tragic—of a fast-disappearing aspect of American culture. The Common Mans accessibility and its enthusiastic and sincere charms make it the perfect antidote to the glib ironies that characterize much contemporary American verse. It will also help to strengthen Mannings reputation as one of his generations most important and original voices.
Synopsis
Untitled and unpunctuated, the seventy poems in this acclaimed collection seem to cascade from one page to another. Maurice Manning extolls the virtues of nature and its many gifts, and finds deep gratitude for the mysterious hand that created it all.
that bare branch that branch made black
by the rain the silver raindrop
hanging from the black branch
Boss I like that black branch
I like that shiny raindrop Boss
tell me if Im wrong but it makes
me think youre looking right
at me now isnt that a lark for me
to think you look that way
upside down like a tree frog
Boss Im not surprised at all
I wouldnt doubt it for
a minute youre always up
to something Ill say one thing
youre all right all right you are
even when youre hanging Boss
Synopsis
With The Gone and the Going Way, Pulitzer finalist Maurice Manning returns us to the beloved and lamented lives and landscape of the hill people of his native Kentucky.
Synopsis
Welcome to “Fog Town Holler,” Pulitzer Prize finalist Maurice Mannings glorious rendering of a landscape not unlike his native Kentucky. Conjuring this mythical place from his own roots and memories — not unlike E. A. Robinsons Tilbury Town or Faulkners Yoknapatawpha County — Manning celebrates and echoes the voices and lives of his beloved hill people.
In Fog Town Holler men have “funny names,” like Tiny Too and Eula Loom. A fox is known as Redleg Johnny. A neighbor issues a complaint against an early-rising rooster; another lives in the chicken coop. “Lawse,” a woman exclaims, “the sun cant hardly find this place!” But they feel the Lord watching, always, as the green water of Shoestring Branch winds its way through hillbilly haunts and memories.
The real world no longer resembles the one brought so vividly to life in the poems in these pages, but through his meditations on his boyhood home, Manning is able to recapture what was lost and still, yet, move beyond it. He brings light to this place the sun cant find and brings a lost world beautifully, magically, once again into our present.
Synopsis
This collection of highly original narrative poems is written in the voice of frontiersman Daniel Boone and captures all the beauty and struggle of nascent America. We follow the progression of Daniel Boone's life, a life led in war and in the wilderness, and see the birth of a new nation. We track the bountiful animals and the great, undisturbed rivers. We stand beside Boone as he buries his brother, then his wife, and finds comfort in his friendship with a slave named Derry.
Praised for his originality, Maurice Manning is an exciting new voice in American poetry.
The darkest place I've ever been
did not require a name. It seemed
to be a gathering place for the lint
of the world. The bottom of a hollow
beneath two ridges, sunk like a stone.
The water was surely old, the dregs
of some ancient sea, but purified
by time, like a man made better by
his years, his old hurts absorbed into
his soul, his losses like a spring
in his breast.
-from "Born Again"
About the Author
MAURICE MANNING, the author of four collections of poetry, was awarded the 2009 Hanes Poetry Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. His first book, Lawrence Booths Book of Visions, was selected by W. S. Merwin for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Manning, a former writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, teaches at Indiana University and Warren Wilson College.
Table of Contents
Contents
boss of the grassy green 1
did you ever have a nickname Boss 3
the night is trotting toward me Boss 4
what color is your collar Boss 5
youre the hay maker Boss 7
do you get happy Boss do you 8
do you have a table 9
O Boss sometimes you take it all 10
are you ever sorry Boss ever 11
you spread the nighttime Boss 12
I told that old dog he 13
why Boss why do the days drift by 14
are you ever in my chest Boss 15
if you had a feed sack Boss what 16
how big is your hand Boss hold it up 17
the light inside the shadow how 18
I like the weaving bees I like 19
there was a fox Boss in my dream 20
you swirl the dirt like nobodys business 21
Ive got butterflies Boss 22
you make it all seem easy Boss 23
yes Ive tried to hide my face 24
did you pull yourself up
by your bootstraps Boss 26
Im sure youve got a sweet spot 27
I guess youve got a lot 28
you toss the stars like clover seed 29
that bare branch that branch made black 30
the two of us were cut 31
boss of the blue sky boss 32
you move in every direction 33
did you teach the woodpecker how 34
the birds the bugs even the trees Boss 35
when you push the clouds
so close together Boss 36
the river looks so level Boss 37
is that you Boss is that 38
of course I like the sun 40
do you have a busy season Boss 41
Im happy Boss happy as a bird 43
did you boss the horse against the barn 44
is there another sky besides 46
the field is flatter than 48
unless my nose is itchy Boss 49
if I say Ive sprung the spring in my step 50
I wonder Boss in all 51
before my eye was burning like 52
the way that buzzard hops it makes 53
I put my face against 54
when I chop wood you warm me twice 55
O boss of ashes boss of dust 56
Ive got a picture of you Boss 57
I got up early Boss the moon 58
your other favorite word 59
Im like an oak tree Boss O 61
you windy blowhard Boss 62
do you put your trousers on one leg 64
are you against me Boss 65
say what have you got underneath 66
guess what Boss Im not even 67
when I see the shadow of the hawk 68
can I say whew to you now Boss 69
you let out light to tease the shadows 70
listen Boss dont think that I 72
my hay day Boss is every day 73
if I didnt know you better Boss 74
the first hawk you hung up in the sky 76
you know that little song 77
it doesnt bother me Boss to have 78
is your barn stuffed to the roof beam 79
beyond the field this time 80
would you trade hee-haws with a crow 82
does an old dog toll beside you Boss 84
you leave a little night inside 86
would you be lonesome if I swam 87
weve always been like this 89
you raise the hawk you hoist the crows 90
thank you for the leaf Boss 92
am I your helper Boss or am 93
Ive got one thing to say to you 94