The Dead Alive and Busy: Selected Essays of Robert Morgan

Morgan writes "with an authority usually associated with the great novelist of the last century."

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.

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.