The Oratorio That Was Time

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.'

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.

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.