One Man's Dark

Maurice Manning

One Man’s Dark, the sixth collection from Pulitzer finalist Maurice Manning, epitomizes the storytelling tradition of his native rural South in poems rich with mythology and lyric beauty. In vivid detail that draws as readily from dreams as from waking life, Manning honors what is rapidly vanishing: the people, landscapes, and things of a world making way for an uncertain and less spiritual future.
 
Like songs sung from a warm porch, these revelatory poems chronicle not only the narratives that have gathered and bound a community over time but also the lyrics that have questioned it, too, in gorgeously intimate and personal terms.

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ISBN: 9781556594748

Format: Hardcover

Theology

In the low woods, in the old dream
of the old, hard land’s dream
of its own darkness turning darker,
and so returned to the first dark
in its first time, the past not past,
I am not now, by being here,
nor will I be, but then; I am
for a moment dust of the first God
in the woods in the first dream and the dark
of that dream which I remember and reach
by remembering and being here,
and once and many times again
I fell out, out of the dream,
because I wanted to love my love—
yet even lost from the dream I found her,
for she was in the holy dream
and loving her means I will die,
which is sad, though love is worth the fix,
so when I pray I say to the God,
Old Man, I understand the dream.

About the Author

Maurice Manning’s first book, Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions, was selected by W.S. Merwin for the Yale Series of Younger Poets and published in 2001. Since then, Manning has published five other collections, including The Common Man, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2011, and One Man’s Dark. Railsplitter is his seventh collection. Manning has held fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers in Scotland. A former Guggenheim …

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