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

In Morgan's hands... details become the stuff of stern, gripping drama.

Robert Morgan's writing is... clear and simple, yet it possesses a luminous poetic quality, a rough beauty hewn from the countyside and from old, forgotten ways.

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.