One Man's Dark Hardcover - 2016

From the publisher

Maurice Manning displays not just terrific cunning but terrific aim. --New York Times Book Review

Manning's genius--his truly staggering genius--is in his ability to put this ancient question into a true American idiom, to make this fundamental human inquiry both vividly, heartbreakingly poignant and madly, idiosyncratically his own. --Smartish Pace

He's saved himself with the most basic of things--a place, its people, and one of its songs. --Orion

Pulitzer finalist Maurice Manning is at the height of his powers as he searches through layers of dreams, imagination, and memory to reconnect with oneself and one's place in the cosmos. Drawing deep from his Kentucky roots, Manning's poems are peopled with ordinary and extraordinary rural characters, as he gives voice to a region well-loved and full of tradition.

From Something to Say about Possums:

I've taken so many backward steps,
I have believed history
can be explained, only to learn,
like sin, it can't. How I've needed more
and more forgiveness! I've needed grace,
and followed it into a dream
of green and yellow light coming
from a-way on high, maybe a mountain.

Maurice Manning is the author of five previous books of poetry, including The Common Man, a 2011 Pulitzer Prize finalist, and Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions, winner of the 2000 Yale Younger Poetry Series Award, selected by W.S. Merwin. A Guggenheim Fellow, he currently teaches at Transylvania University and is on the permanent faculty of Warren Wilson College.

About the author