Maurice Manning

Photo Credit: Steve Cody as posted on http://lightboxpoetry.com/?p=353

"Poet Maurice Manning was born and raised in Kentucky, and often writes about the land and culture of his home. He earned a BA from Earlham College, an MA in English from the University of Kentucky, and an MFA from the University of Alabama... Manning grew up listening to stories of his father’s childhood spent on a farm in Eastern Kentucky and has been inspired by the lives of his grandmothers, great grandmothers, and a great-great-grandmother. Inventive and historical, his work reflects his heritage and a respect for the natural world. Merwin wrote of Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions, “The writing’s unfaltering audacity is equaled by its content, and the result is an outstanding collection, still more astonishing for a first book; the achievement of a fresh and brilliant talent.” A Companion to Owls is a collection of poems in the voice of frontiersman Daniel Boone, replete with details of the world of Daniel Boone. Bucolics, in the tradition of pastoral poetry, is a collection of untitled poems about the natural world, addressed to a figure referred to as “Boss. "

Source: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/maurice-manning

Live Readings

Poems

Sad and Alone

Well, this is nothing new, nothing

to rattle the rafters in the noggin,

this moment of remembering

and its kissing cousin the waking dream.

I wonder if I'll remember it?

I've had a vision of a woman

reclining underneath a tree:

she's about half naked and little by little

I'm sprinkling her burial mounds

with grass. This is the kind of work

I like. It lets me remember, and so

I do. I remember the time I laid

my homemade banjo in the fire

and let it burn. There was nothing else

to burn and the house was cold;

the cigar box curled inside the flames.

But the burst of heat was over soon,

and once the little roar was done,

I could hear the raindrops plopping up

the buckets and kettles, scattered out

like little ponds around the room.

It was night and I was a boy, alone

and left to listen to that old music.

I liked it. I've liked it ever since.

I loved the helpless people I loved.

That's what a little boy will do,

but a grown man will turn it all

to sadness and let it soak his heart

until he wrings it out and dreams

about another kind of love,

some afternoon beneath a tree.

Burial mounds—that's hilarious.

from The Common Man

Three Truths, One Story
In faith, dear friend, I can't make upa name like Turnipseed, or that
I knew a man who went by sucha goodly name. Now, everything
I'm telling you is true. This manhad come from people who knew what they
were doing once, and why it mattered.Do you know what you're doing? Do you
know something old? A turnipseedis tiny, it's a little bit
of hardly anything. I guessthat's something old to know: you could hold
an itty bit of almost nothingand know it's something still, and know
it's always been that way. Do youlike knowing things like that? I knew
a bunch of folks some years agowhose name was Stonecypher, I kid
you not, and some of them were stillengaged with stones and had the hands
to prove it. They lived way out. Speakingof out there places, my father told
me just the other day a taleabout his mother: Mama came
from Leatherwood, he said, Lord knowswhat they were doing there, back then.
And that is true for sure; there's nota living person left to say
what they were doing there. They hada stripey mule, as Mama said—
the stripes run crossed the ginny's flank—she told me once, but she is gone,
and missing her has gotten old.There are words and there are deeds, and both
are dying out, dying awayfrom where they were and what they meant.
God save the man who has the heartto think of anything more sad.--from Bucolics (2007)

Recommended Titles

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse