Green River

"The solidity, range, intellectual vigor and beauty of Robert Morgan's poems comprise, it's now clear, the careful, painstaking signature of one of our best poets." -WILLIAM MATTHEWS Grounded in the Blue Ridge Mountains of his native North Carolina, Robert Morgan writes about rural life, family history, folklore, fundamentalist religion, and the idea of kinship between people, land, and the natural world. For over twenty years he has striven for plainness, compactness, and simplicity in work that is nonetheless as metaphorically complex as Robert Frost and as lyrically rich as Gerard Manley Hopkins. Easily missed because of its soft-spoken yet sure tone, Morgan's distinctly American voice in poetry comes through clearly in these selections from seven volumes, plus ten new pieces. "Robert Morgan is a poet whose meticulous details open into vistas of unforeseen implication. Always engaging, always profound, his fine poems are rewarding in every aspect that we observe of them. Green River is a summing up of the man's enormous achievement. -Fred Chappell "Anyone who reads Morgan's poems as paeans of the rural life is misreading his work as equally as those who once thought Frost a kindly, old New England Nature Poet. Much of his work lies in that strange territory we used to call the human heart: he never fails to confirm a common human frailty, a need for order in the chaos of memory." - -P. H. Liotta, Southern Literary Journal ROBERT MORGAN grew up on a small farm near Zirconia, North Carolina, and is now Professor of English at Cornell University. His work has won numerous awards, including the Southern Poetry Review Prize in 1975, the Eunice Tietjens Prize in 1979, the Jacaranda Review Fiction Prize in 1988, and the Hanes Poetry Prize from the Fellowship of Southern Writers in 1991. He has published eight books of poetry and two books of fiction.