Sigodlin

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.

Nobody else, as far as I know, even begins to achieve in poetry any of the things that Robert Morgan has been doing for twenty years with such abundance and variety.
First, he painstakingly attends to those little nameless unremembered moments of fascination that everybody else is too busy for -- hatpins and grasshoppers, odometers and overalls. Along with his fabulous lucidity, he sets new standards of technical accomplishment in all sorts of verse forms, including the anagram poem and the pantoum. And - most unexpectedly in an agrarian writer - he has the metaphysical imagination that can see the writing spider as "the little webster" -- what a brilliant conceit! These poems, which resemble ideal centaurs in their combination of animal body and deep-thinking head, produce a sum of vision and wisdom.

I have for many years now relished the textures of Robert Morgan's words and objects. He has more touchable things per line than one would think the world offers; but that is exactly how he gets us to stop ignoring our world.

Morgan remains one of our keenest poets of lucidity and attention and makes sacred the peripheral, the often unsung. He stares deeply into that which we rarely consider, as all good poets do.

Any new collection of poems by Robert Morgan is a gift... In the past thirty years I have learned a great deal from this man, who is exemplary as a poet, as a prose writer, and as a human being.