Gone and the Going Away - Hardcover

by Maurice Manning (Author)

Welcome to "Fog Town Holler," Pulitzer Prize finalist Maurice Manning's glorious rendering of a landscape not unlike his native Kentucky. Conjuring this mythical place from his own roots and memories -- not unlike E. A. Robinson's Tilbury Town or Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County -- Manning celebrates and echoes the voices and lives of his beloved hill people.

Front Jacket

Welcome to Fog Town Holler, Pulitzer Prize finalist Maurice Manning s glorious rendering of a landscape not unlike his native Kentucky. Conjuring this mythical place from his own roots and memories not unlike E. A. Robinson s Tilbury Town or Faulkner s Yoknapatawpha County Manning celebrates and echoes the voices and lives of his beloved hill people.
In Fog Town Holler men have funny names, like Tiny Too and Eula Loom. A fox is known as Redleg Johnny. A neighbor issues a complaint against an early-rising rooster; another lives in the chicken coop. Lawse, a woman exclaims, the sun can t hardly find this place! But they feel the Lord watching, always, as the green water of Shoestring Branch winds its way through hillbilly haunts and memories.
The real world no longer resembles the one brought so vividly to life in the poems in these pages, but through his meditations on his boyhood home, Manning is able to recapture what was lost and still, yet, move beyond it. He brings light to this place the sun can t find and brings a lost world beautifully, magically, once again into our present.
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Back Jacket

A fresh and brilliant talent. W. S. Merwin
"Manning celebrates the virtues of nature and finds deep gratitude for the mysterious hand that created it all." Deseret Morning News
"Maurice Manning reminds us of our agrarian roots and that our best metaphors for the ineffable all spring from the soil." Mark Jarman, author of To the Green Man
"Manning's greatest gift is his uncanny ability to translate the spoken language of his region onto the page and make it sing. In our historical moment, in which we come across such a resistance to poetry, it is refreshing to discover a book that constantly argues for itself, that justifies its existence through the telling of tales both heartbreaking and hilarious, and announces so clearly its relevance to our lives." Brian Brodeur
Manning has big talents, and none are more impressive than his singing . . . I think few will disagree this is memorable music, entertaining, rich, often spooky-wise." Dave Smith, author of Little Boats, Unsalvaged

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