Robert Morgan has long been one of this country's finest poets. Now he shows that his hand is just as steady in fiction.

Gripping storytelling, indelible sense of time and place... Morgan turns the stories of prosaic lives into page-turners.

Robert Morgan has a rare and cunning gift: he can sift through the detritus of the past, pluck objects and images from his memory (especially his childhood) and elevate them to the point where they become -- in the sense that Campbell used the word -- 'numinous.'

One of Robert Morgan's chief claims on our attention is the backbone he puts into the backcountry lore that grounds his work, the stately proprieties and meditative gravity he hews out of the hardscrabble folkways of his native Blue Ridge Mountains... His is a fine-grained, self-implicating intelligence that can span the intricacies of both pine resin and pantoums.

Morgan has contributed so much to the health of southern poetry over the last thirty-five years that the southerness of his work is axiomatic... [His] reputation is made, in no small part, on the strength of his ear, with which he has produced some of the most sonorous poems in the language.