The Strange Attractor

The unfading poetic brilliance of Robert Morgan shines through these ninety-three pieces spanning thirty-five years. Celebrated for his recent fiction, Morgan makes obvious in this volume he was first, and remains foremost, a wordsmith of poetic sensibilities--a craftsman of taut, forceful imagery, alert with wonder to the mystery of what lies in plain sight.

Like Robert Frost, Morgan takes the natural world as a metaphorical base for human projection. Much of his work is a love song to the Appalachian Mountain terrain and a way of life all but gone: his father speaking in tongues; his mother canning peaches; carpentry, farming, the seasons in slow motion, family history, and wind-borne strains of music. He captures the aura around such common objects as resin, cellars, hog-wire fence, the whippoorwill, and crickets. Infusing his poetry with mountain idiom, even when pondering the cosmos beyond, Morgan creates lyrics with a rhythm like rain--"to be rocked to sleep by mountains / equals the rest of heroes."

Fourteen new poems open the volume, and selections from nine previous collections follow. Robert Morgan's The Strange Attractor grants readers a generous overview of an important American poet's work.