Robert Morgan's fiction is "about people who have a deep sense of themselves, who were not created by a huge and complicated society but by a small, simple one in which individual character sprouted slowly and in trial bloomed... wise, eloquent."

At their finest, his stripped-down and almost primitive sentences burn with the raw, lonesome pathos of Hank Williams's best songs.

Robert Morgan's poems are always exciting for their precise knowledge of country things, and of how things go in the world of natural fact and process. This new collection gives us also some delightful lore from the Southern mountains: we learn of the horse fiddle, and holy cussing, and the intrepid pastor who held off bear or panther with his umbrella.

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.'

It is such a pleasure to rest on the fertile banks of [Morgan's] imagination, engaged by a steady current of haunting images and carefully chiseled phrases, that when the final poems comes, the reader feels as if the power company dammed the Green River without putting it to a vote.