The Strange Attractor: New and Selected Poems

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.

Author: Robert Morgan
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 04/01/2004
Pages: 137
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.49lbs
Size: 8.86h x 6.16w x 0.45d
ISBN: 9780807129524

Review Citation(s):
New York Review of Books 12/20/2007 pg. 73

About the Author
Robert Morgan grew up on a farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina and currently lives in an old farmhouse outside Ithaca, New York, with his wife, Nancy. He is the author of eleven books of poems, including Topsoil Road, and is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Campbell- Brockman Poetry Award, the James G. Hanes Poetry Prize of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the Greensboro Review Amon Liner Poetry Prize, and Poetry magazine's Eunice Tietjens Prize. He has also published eight novels, among them Gap Creek, which was a New York Times Notable Book, an Oprah Book Club Selection, and winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.