The Blue Valleys: Stories

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.

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.