About this item
Highlights
- From church barn to apple orchard, from snow-covered pasture to secret moonshine cabin, Manning's Snakedoctor reinvigorates the Kentucky pastoral through poems that find light in shadow, good in evil, love in a father's stinging blow.Maurice Manning returns to the Kentucky countryside in his eighth collection, Snakedoctor.
- About the Author: Maurice Manning is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently Railsplitter (2019) and Snakedoctor (2023).
- 128 Pages
- Poetry, American
Description
Book Synopsis
From church barn to apple orchard, from snow-covered pasture to secret moonshine cabin, Manning's Snakedoctor reinvigorates the Kentucky pastoral through poems that find light in shadow, good in evil, love in a father's stinging blow.Maurice Manning returns to the Kentucky countryside in his eighth collection, Snakedoctor. Existing between haunting memory and pastoral dreamscape, this quiet collection showcases Manning's storytelling at its finest. Simple, four-beat lines hold epiphanies--"the barn is just an empty church"-- and announce visits from seven-foot strangers named Mr. True. Here, God is reimagined as a "serious banjo player" who calls the world to sing. And sing Manning does. Through rhyme, blues, and haiku, Snakedoctor trains our ears to hear music in the mundane, to find beauty all around us: in the annotated margins of a well-read book, the flight of a father's shadow puppet, the yellow centers of daisies. Punctuated by rain's pitter-patter on a tin wash tub, and the "ring of lonely" in a farmer's voice as he calls his cattle home, Snakedoctor is a collection that will leave you wanting to dog-ear its pages. From childhood to fatherhood, church barn to apple orchard, moonshine to moonbeam, we leave these poems understanding Manning's wish: "I wanted to make a prayer and I did, / in half-sleep after the dream."
Review Quotes
Praise for Snakedoctor
"Manning is at his best in quiet moments of stunning lyricism... There is a deep reverence for the ancestral spirit of the land, as if Kentucky's rich hills and flowing streams were a part of its residents' DNA. Manning's verse resonates with the plaintive loneliness of his rural landscapes and the divine presence that alleviates that loneliness, be it God, one's forebears, or poetry."--Publishers Weekly
"He nails his images the way a restless boy, up in a tree with a slingshot, nails anything sentient that wanders into view."--New York Times Book Review
"Myth-making is a more important business than what's true and false, and Manning's ability to transcend the problem so blithely on the strength of his overall conception is impressive."--Contemporary Poetry Review
"[W]ithin a few lines, the language becomes layered and hints at the constant intersection of the present and the eternal."--Washington Post
"A gifted storyteller who slights neither the physical world nor the metaphysical . . . Maurice Manning is a major American poet speaking from the heart of Appalachia."--Appalachian Heritage
"Manning's lines are some of the tightest in contemporary poetry; he is a precision poet in the truest sense of the word. Efficient line-composition is an essential skill for a poet because it does all the hard work and is the foundation and structure, letting each poem offer up its unique personality."--Pleiades
"There's something Taoist about Maurice Manning. Close your eyes and he's wandering around the 6th Century BCE landlocked Henan province instead of the Twenty-first Century Kentucky countryside, philosophizing about love, time, art, remembering poignant folk stories about moonshiners, his father and grandfather, all in the context of lush and lonely rural Kentucky, musing, generally, about existence and how we fit in."--Charles Rammelkamp, The Lake
"Manning's work is set apart by his belief in the narrative quality of the world--a belief manifested in poetry that conveys self-forgetful wonderment at nature, a sincere longing for transcendence, and a quiet hope that beauty will last. . . . Decisions about the form and content of his poetry aren't merely aesthetic--the aesthetic implies the ethical. When he flirts with and then rejects Wright's free verse style, refusing 'to leave the sense of meaning / behind, ' he's ultimately rejecting the ethic of the unmediated self and clinging instead to his familial, cultural, and spiritual heritage. He's embracing an ethic of citizenship."--Timothy Kleiser, Literary Matters
About the Author
Maurice Manning is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently Railsplitter (2019) and Snakedoctor (2023). Manning has held fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers in Scotland. A former Guggenheim fellow, Manning teaches at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky and for the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. His poems and essays have appeared in TIME, The Sewanee Review, and The New Yorker. He lives in Kentucky with his family.