Description
Book Synopsis For more than fifty years Robert Morgan has brought to life the landscape, history and culture of the Southern Appalachia of his youth. In 30 acclaimed volumes, including poetry, short story collections, novels and nonfiction prose, he has celebrated an often marginalized region. His many honors include four NEA Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as television appearances (The Best American Poetry: New Stories from the South, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards). This first book on Morgan collects appreciations and analyses by some of his most dedicated readers, including fellow poets, authors, critics and scholars. An unpublished interview with him is included, along with an essay by him on the importance of sense of place, and a bibliography of publications by and about him.
Table of ContentsPreface
Robert M. West
I. On the Poetry
A Prospect Newly Necessary
Fred Chappell
Robert Morgan's Pelagian Georgics: Twelve Essays
William Harmon
Looking for Native Ground: Robert Morgan
Rita Sims Quillen
"The Witness of Many Writings": Robert Morgan's Poetic Career
Michael McFee
Music's Mirror: Robert Morgan's Musica Speculativa
Jim Clark
The Elegiac Strain in Robert Morgan's Poetry
Bhisham Bherwani
The Missing as Muse: Treatments of Absence in the Poetry
Robert M. West
II. Robert Morgan's People and Places
An Essay and Photo Gallery
Jesse Graves
III. On the Prose
Mountain Time: History and Forgetting in The Mountains Won't Remember
Paul Lincoln Sawyer
Blood Soil Field: The Physicality of The Balm of Gilead Tree
Suzanne Booker-Canfield
"The Little Clearing of Now": Storytellers in The Hinterlands
Rebecca Godwin
Faith, Sex, Talk, and Work: The Cornerstones of Community in The Truest Pleasure and This Rock
George Hovis
The Work of Love in Gap Creek
Martha Greene Eads
Tunes from the "Madrigal of Time" in Brave Enemies
Harriette C. Buchanan
Acting in Faith: Robert Morgan's The Road from Gap Creek
Thomas Alan Holmes
Robert Morgan's Nonfiction Books: Crossing Over the Mountains
Ted Olson
IV. In His Own Words
A Sense of Place
Robert Morgan
"No Writing in the Abstract": An Interview
Robert M. West
A New Robert Morgan Bibliography
Robert M. West and Jesse Graves
About the Contributors
Index
