Bucolics: Poems

by Maurice Manning

Untitled and unpunctuated, the seventy poems in this collection seem to cascade from one page to another. Maurice Manning extolls the virtues of nature and its many gifts, and finds deep gratitude for the mysterious hand that created it all.



that bare branch that branch made black



by the rain the silver raindrop



hanging from the black branch



Boss I like that black branch



I like that shiny raindrop Boss



tell me if I’m wrong but it makes



me think you’re looking right



at me now isn’t that a lark for me



to think you look that way



upside down like a tree frog



Boss I’m not surprised at all



I wouldn’t doubt it for



a minute you’re always up



to something I’ll say one thing



you’re all right all right you are



even when you’re hanging Boss

Genres: Poetry, Nature

95 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

MAURICE MANNING, the author of four collections of poetry, was awarded the 2009 Hanes Poetry Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. His first book, Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions, was selected by W. S. Merwin for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Manning, a former writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, teaches at Indiana University and Warren Wilson College.

Reviews

[Elizabeth]

Woah.... maybe a case of the right book at the right time, but the original and compelling and entire vision of this book just sucked me in. 70 poems all in one voice, all spoken by a farmer to "Boss" (God). There are some ticks that repeat a time to many, but overall, this person talking about weather, plants, animals, addressing Boss intimately and crankily and reverently is amazing.

[Barb H · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have stated that poetry is not my favorite form of literature. Of course there have been exceptions. Fortunately, one of my respected Goodread Friends has recommended this book to me. I must say, I was delighted by this little treasury of poems!

These untitled verses were novel and each one sang to me. As the title denotes, they all involve Nature. In addition they each give tribute to "Boss", Manning's apparent sobriquet for the Almighty. Each seems to demonstrate his sweet delight in nature in an innocent, rich manner.

It would be difficult to find a favorite, but here are a few examples:

LXXVII
am I your helper Boss or am
I not do I bring in the hay
for me or you or only for
the horse I help the horse he helps
me too why sometimes Boss he hooks
his head across my shoulder just
to rest it there he'll heave a sigh
as if he's tuckered he always makes
me laugh he knows I know he wants
an apple Boss his heavy head
on me it helps it helps so much... (p.93)

Despite the lack of punctuation or capitalization, each thing of beauty unfolds and results in a natural cadence.

XVII
I like the weaving bees I like
the purple clover blossoms the way
the pasture runs away I like
in winter sinking lambs in straw
how I like bearing buckets full
of water waking up the sun
I like making up a little song
O looking at the sky ... (p.19)

I could include more of these lovely, simple gems, but I will leave that to those who read my reviews.

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Always eager these days to read material nostalgically reminding me of that part of my childhood spent in the country, I especially like the poetry of Maurice Manning. Bucolics is, to me, essentially religious poetry. These are poems, psalms, songs sung by a man of the earth connected in profound and willing wonder to a God he calls Boss. These are hillbilly hosannas.

when I chop wood you warm me twice
you send a wind then send the cool
behind it Boss we work together
side by side when I drop the share
in the dirt you make it sing you give
a song to turning dirt we keep
some big irons in the fire don't we
Boss

[Angelina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wanted to like this a lot, but so much of it did not resonate with me because I struggled with reading it. No punctuation is a cool move to make, but it does make it hard to read and interpret, especially when the poet uses so much enjambment. That being said, there were moments that I loved. (3 stars)

Second reading: three years later, this book hit so many questions in my soul and so many experiences I've had it's now one of my favorites. (5 stars)

[Gary McDowell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm supposed to be writing a review of this book. I can't do it. I know, I'm not supposed to say "can't," but I honestly just don't know where to start...

I may leave this one for awhile and read it again later. I LOVED it, but there's something comical about it that makes me giggle when I read some of the poems. And that's not usually a reaction I like to have. Weird. Really weird.

[Erika B. (SOS BOOKS) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm just going to copy and paste what I wrote down for my class discussion board! hahaha #selfplagiarism

"Shepherds are honest people, let them sing."-George Herbert (I loved this-that is the only reason this is here)

Yay pastoral poetry! Virgil/Vergil would be proud! (How do you spell his name anyway?!) I actually thoroughly enjoyed the use of the word "Boss." At first it kind of threw me for a loop because I obviously associate it with slavery which is darker subject matter. I decided though that the intermingling of that darkness is what makes Manning's writing celebratory and cool. It's repetition became almost calming and prayerful. The Appalachian dialect really creates a very soothing tone. I think I would read this book on a Sunday evening in the summertime. That's the feeling/tone that I took away from it. He takes very raw materials found within nature and makes them seem wondrous. His connection to God and nature is undeniable. I felt like I was back in American literature learning about transcendentalism. (Whitman would be proud too!) I think that addressing God as "Boss" also has an interesting twist to it because the speaker isn't necessarily always reverent. He seems upset at times but then he also can turn that emotion into a very interesting intimacy. I liked the lack of punctuation because it catered to the simplicity of the poem. Sometimes grammar becomes complicated and I feel like this speaker is so salt-of-the-earth that it would distract readers from his messages. I feel like I'm writing a book review! I'd give this four out of five stars! I liked this one!

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

I zipped through these like an addict, lighting the tip of one with the still-burning end of the other. It is good for me to read this. So often I am lusting after wild words, strange lexicons, things a Victorian theosophist might say. It is a wonder what Manning can do with the simplest of raw materials - soil, leaf, rock. Our narrator, a farmer in his field, is in conversation with a silent and inscrutable "Boss." The resulting hymn-like soliloquies are so intricately crafted as to allow their scaffolding to disappear. We get gifts like this: "You're dripping hums between my lips;" and this: "a bird/with a whistle in its bones." As with all hymns, we get our share of graves and winding sheets ("all things go one direction down"), but somehow, Manning makes even the dark moments feel celebratory.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ah, Joyous Affirmation! Let Maurice Manning be led to the head of the table. If I had to choose between drugs and this book, I'd probably choose this book. Is this book married? Because I'd marry it.

[Sherry Chandler · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have imported my review of Bucolics from my defunct blog and added it below.

I wouldn't exactly call it a review.

Manning is a poet willing to take big leaps. So far, I think he's landed on his feet.

But then I am prejudiced, because he seems determined to remain a Kentucky poet first and foremost, a poet of the common people.

Which doesn't keep his poetry from being very smart.

***

In the opening sentence to his essay "Poetry and Religion,"* Mark Jarman says

Just as poetry persists in the face of widespread indifference, so has a sense of the religous in poetry continued to exist despite the indifference of most poets to religion. It might be better to modify the word indifference or to refract it into ignorance, nostalgia, and animosity. Nevertheless, the religious impulse in poetry endures; many poems being written today show that urge to be tied to or united with or at one with a supernatural power that exists before, after, and throughout creation.

Aha, thought I, when I read this sentence, I have found my way to talk about Maurice Manning's Bucolics. Others have spoken of the prosody, of the simplicity of the voice, have desribed the collection, Manning's third, as a series of 78 numbered pieces that read like rustic psalms.

Well, let me take that qualification back. The Book of Psalms itself was supposedly written by a rustic, attributed to the shepherd king David and using the language of shepherds and others who live close to the earth. So the term "rustic psalm" is tautological.

A psalm of course is a sacred song. A bucolic is at once a pastoral poem and a herdsman/shepherd/farmer.

Maurice Manning's Bucolics are spoken to a deity called Boss:

I
boss of the grassy green
boss of the silver puddle
how happy is my lot
to tend the green to catch
the water when it rains
to do the doing Boss

There they are defined, Boss and bucolic, on the first page, the overlord and the servant.

"I do not believe," says Jarman, "that there is one genre of religious poetry being written in America today, as there was in England in the 17th century..." Jarman is, of course, speaking of those poets we call the Metaphysicals: John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvel, et al.

It could be argued that Manning has set out to write an American metaphysical poetry. He began this work with A Companion for Owls, though it might be argued that it was there in the very beginning. Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions was, after all, a book of visions.

Jarman himself says, on his cover blurb to Bucolics:

In these marvelous addresses to the Almighty, Maurice Manning reminds us of our agrarian roots and that our best metaphors for the ineffable all spring from the soil. These psalms, powerful and hectoring, tautological and unique, are reminiscent of King David's. They are spellbinding.

Spellbinding is an interesting choice of descriptor.

To return to Jarman's essay, first published in 1991, he goes on to say:

The desire for atonement, secularized by the Romantic movement, takes a characteristic form in American poetry about nature. ...The poet William Matthews has observed humorously that American literature is "thick with forest Christians" and that the theme of many nature poems is "I went out into the woods today and it made me feel, you know, sort of religious." The satire is effective because of its self-evidence. ...What interests me, however, is how in approaching the mystery with religious respect, American poets anthropomorphize nature, even to the point of domesticating it ... in order to make it inviting, and most importantly, inviting to us.

Is Boss an anthropomorphized version of nature? I asked myself that often, reading the poems. That would be the easy answer, for me any way. But if he is, he isn't always that inviting. Sometimes he is remote and cold:

XII
why Boss why do the days drift by
like a leaf asleep on a bed of water
does the leaf forgive the tree that let
it fall into the water does
it know how stiff the river's face
can be how smileless...
when all the leaf was trying to do
is cuddle Boss does cuddling move
the likes of you are you the river or
the thing that makes the river's face
so still...

In talking about her book Inventing Niagara at the 2008 Kentucky Women Writers Conference, Ginger Strand commented on the way humans like to think of nature as something over apart from us, something we do not partake of. According to Jarman, Americans have

a fundamental belief ...that nature or the earth is better than the world where we actually do our living.

Manning's bucolic lives in nature. His companions seem to be a horse and a dog, sometimes a fox or a rooster drop into the poems, but as far as other humans go, this creature seems lonelier than Caliban, as much a creature of the earth, as enslaved of the Boss as Caliban is of Prospero (speaking of spellbinding).

XXII
yes I've tried to hide my face
behind a tree I have been glad
to see the river run with mud
so fast it will not hold my look
but believe me Boss I can not hide
I can not muddy you I can
not chop you from my stony field
you're like a weed...

"Yet," says Jarman,

in the pantheistic view of nature I have been describing, the idea of reconstitution as reincarnation is strong; certainly it is implicit in the Christian sacrament of communion.

I don't find much of the New Testament in Bucolics. Though the bucolic is a farmer and caught in the cycle of nature, speaks of haymaking, the plow, the hoe, though he jokes with the Boss, calls him "you sneaky devil, you cut up," he may have more in common with Job than with Peter. He compares himself to the horse and the hoe, not to the seed.

LXXVIII
...Boss
I don't like that that moment when
you turn me out alone to graze
to graze is such a hot-faced slight
as close as breath but never close
enough to know if I was hitched
for real or if the hitching Boss
I felt was just a feeling sweet
but not the honeypot itself
which swings the gate right back to you
O tell me why I can't hold back
this bitter thought are you the bee
or just a stinging story Boss

And so the story ends, on a bitter question.

Like unto Jarman's question:

Is it no longer possible [after the violence of the 20th century] to see history in religious terms, as a function of the personality of God, a God capable of judgment and mercy and expecting obedience?

Certainly the bucolic seems to take great joy in the world the Boss has given him but his constant complaint is that the Boss won't answer his questions.

It probably isn't fair to compare Bucolics to the nature poetry Jarman cites in "Poetry and Religion." Though there are trees in the poems, leaves and branches, there is little of the forest, the wild. There is none of the violence that Jarman sees as lying at the heart of Christianity. There are none of the noble predators that populate the poems of Mary Oliver. A fox shows up in dreams, on the edge of things, a mystical fox:

LXIX
beyond the field this time
he's back once more the fox
beyond my doings Boss
beyond my little day

The hawk is having fun riding the wind: "I wonder if you said listen Red / I'm going to let you ride the wind / you won't even have to flap". And while the bucolic interacts with a buzzard, the bird is not the vehicle of resurrection that he is in Robinson Jeffers's poem "Vulture." He's more a clown, an incompetent:

XLVI
the way that buzzard hops it makes
me sad to see him Boss the way
he flops around I know his wings
won't work he's got a naked tail

And as Manning's carrion-eater is not a high-soaring vulture but a grounded old buzzard, so Bucolics is not nature poetry but pastoral, agrarian, concerned with the barnyard and not the forest. The bucolic lives in the country of Wendell Berry, the mad farmer. In fact, he might be called a mad farmer in his own right.

The simplicity of the vocabulary, the praise of apparently simple things like a red bug on a leaf or a drop of rain on a black branch, might fool one into thinking these are simple poems. But the simple diction has overtones of William Blake, and however jocular the bucolic's language, the spiritual problems he sets forth in these poems are as knotty as anything in John Donne.

__________
*Quotes from "Poetry and Religion" taken from Mark Jarman, The Secret of Poetry (Story Line Press, 2001)

[Whitnee Forest]

loved

[Paul Cockeram · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maurice Manning's collection of poetry is a deeply American book. As its title suggests, all 78 of these poems celebrate the land and our stewardship of the plants and animals living there. The poems share a single speaker, whose voice reads like the gentle hero of a western: observant, soft-spoken, accustomed to the silence of the trail, a man who says only what he means and never wastes a word. The speaker addresses his words to "Boss," a character whose identity emerges over the course of the book as, basically, God the creator and mover of the natural world. For the speaker, Boss keeps the birds in the sky and the animals in the plains. Boss is responsible for every beauty that aches the heart, as well as every loss that wrenches the gut. The George Herbert quotation that begins Manning's book, "Shepherds are honest people, let them sing," serves as the mission statement, with the "singing" being that of the psalmist.

That the word "boss" is an Americanism born in Manhattan shows us the first of many signs that Bucolics is rooted in American tradition. This book celebrates the connections between our love of the natural world and our deeply spiritual culture. Bringing together god and nature, Manning evokes our transcendentalist heritage, our propensity for finding what is divine and miraculous within fields and horses, crows and falcons, sunshine and wind. Rendered in deceptively plain language, these meditations find wisdom and beauty aplenty; however, this collection has more than enough texture, with the speaker's worshipful voice soon giving way to wonder and even, at times, anger against Boss' implacable silence. The speaker runs the gamut of expression, speaking in tones of doubt and sadness and resentment and fear about all the heaviest-hitting subjects, mortality and aging and death. "although the tallest tree may reach/your chin I know one day you'll bend/it over Boss without a speck/of pity not a moment's pause/you'll drag it to the darkest ground/all days go one direction down." If Boss is the creator of blue skies and golden sun, then Boss is also the creator of brown dirt and gray ash. This speaker grapples with life's largest mysteries in terms simple and honest, the sort of truthful yet unrefined poet celebrated by Whitman and Ginsberg. Every poem supports ample rereading.

Some noteworthy features of the writing include the lack of punctuation, the liberal use of the vocative O, and of course, the frequent addresses of "Boss." One reader told me she couldn't look past the "Boss," but I found its repetition calming and reverent. As for the lack of punctuation, Manning uses that decision to its greatest advantage. His sentences always hang together grammatically, so that removing the punctuation never causes confusion; rather, Manning adds layers of possible meaning by subtracting the commas and periods, opening up possibilities that allow a single poem to be correctly and meaningfully punctuated in several different ways. I had a Creative Writing class explore these possibilities in one poem, and they enthusiastically examined the impact of various changes in punctuation for what turned out to be one of the semester's most successful lessons.

This is one reason I say Manning's poems are deceptive in their apparent simplicity. Manning is a master craftsman of language, though he has created a plainspoken, superlatively wise character who manifests the great American myth of the genius from the sticks. This is a book I plan to revisit frequently, whenever I want to reawaken myself to the wonder and mystery that abide in every park and field, every morning and afternoon and evening.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Shepherds are honest people, let them sing."

That line from George Herbert opens Bucolics, Maurice Manning's third book.

Haunting and funny, innovative and heartening, this collection of seventy untitled, unpunctuated poems features a nameless land laborer talking to his creator, whom he calls 'boss.' Not a religious book in the traditional sense, this is rather one of questions, wonder, and, at times, sadness. The poems move like a reverie and it strikes deep. I swallowed big pieces of this book when I first picked it up; as I neared the end, I took it in tiny sips, not wanting my first read to be over so soon. And while the book is a smooth, easy read, it's as deceptively simple as a psalm.

The fourth poem reads:

"are you every sorry Boss ever
have a problem ever get
shamefaced stuff your hands
in your big boss pockets
it’s never easy is it Boss never
boss ever get a slow start ever
feel like you’re at the end
of the line the end of your rope
have you ever had it up to here
wherever that is on you I know
it’s high up to your neck Boss
the top of your head you must
be tall to take it all the way
you do taller than the top
of the moon Boss O I wonder
what you see when you look up"

But I don't like excerpting that one poem, because Bucolics is very much a collection. While Manning published individual poems in literary magazines, it's hard for me to imagine their singular impact. Each gathers strength from the poems that surround it, and I'm glad I was first introduced to this work as a whole. The narrative is catalyzed by juxtaposition; emotion hangs in the breaks between poems and lines. Funny little rhythms and syntactical recurrance tell big stories. I haven't read anything like this before.

I'm not the only one who was a little bewildered by my encounter with this book. Poet Andrew Hudgins described this as " seamless and utterly contemporary melding of Virgil, Hesiod, the Bible, folk songs, labor songs, and God knows what all else into something new and wonderful." I'd add that the collection is firmly grounded (so to speak) in the soil of the Earth. The patterns of nature and of the narrator's work with animals and dirt are echoed in this extended poetic cycle. And if that sounds too serious for your taste, know that these poems are webbed with humor.

"I wonder if that horse’s sports are real
or painted on it makes me smile
to think about it Boss even
field hands need a laugh or two
a rusty riddle a twisty tongue
I wouldn’t put it past you O
you sneaky devil you cutup Boss"

I heard once that the more you like a piece of writing, the more tempted you are to demonstrate its virtues by simply quote from the thing. As is the case for me now. After Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions and A Companion for Owls: Being the Commonplace Book of D. Boone, Long Hunter, Back Woodsman &c., Bucolics affirms Manning as my very favorite living poet. And I'd like nothing more than to put a copy of his poems in your hand.

If it sounds like I'm gushing, maybe I am. So let me shift to urgency: Read this book. Now

[Sarah Peecher · Rating 3 out of 5]

i appreciate manning’s commitment to the bit, but it feels like there were just a few to many similar poems for me.

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short-lined, unpunctuated little conversations w/a God who is pictured as a laconic rural laborer. Calls the G-O-D B-O-S-S. Lots of rhymes and little bells being rung. Devotional in the way of Christopher Smart, Blake, prayer primer books--much play which makes the sudden emergence of doubt more unsettling: "I'm happy Boss happy as a bird / hopping on a branch just a little branch" to "what reason can you give me now / for filling half of everything / with honey just to leave the half / remaining torn from even hope / for sweetness like a rabbit's lip / no doubt you run your finger down / the little face of everything / to cleave it clean in two." Boss takes on shades of slave driver.

I plowed right in--the book invites that. Unfortunately, a sort of samey-malaise settles over the last third and while the floating syntax makes turns from praise, speculation, fear, doubt etc faster, there are parts where they could work harder to have the poem cut backwards into itself. This aside, some poems are absolute knock outs and Manning is a genius in employing and getting away with clusters of monosyllabic rhymes.

Ear candy for anyone trying to write simple poems. Thanks for the recommendation, Mr. Big-Fuggin-Deal-Verse-Daily.

[Kirk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well done, Maurice! Giving words to the longings and thoughts of the soul in a unique form makes them that much more sacred and perspicacious.

[Erica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charming book of poems. I almost cringe to use the word charming because it almost sounds condescending, and yet this book is brave in how directly it addresses the entity Manning calls "Boss," whom I take to be God or whoever that mysterious force is that makes and unmakes all. The questioning is so guileless but intelligent. I almost felt like I was being led through all the unfiltered questions I have had for that nameless, elusive being, yet the author still managed to pose those questions and to challenge "Boss" lyrically, eloquently.

[Evelyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book of poetry that I have revisited many times now. I had the pleasure of hearing Manning read some selections from "Bucolics" during my undergraduate studies, and his delivery was simply stunning. I love the voice of the protagonist, a common-man in a world of rural beauty, who banters with his "boss". Manning had such a clever, simple idea in writing from this point of view, and executes it beautifully through a masterful control of form and rhythm.

[William Reichard · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a beautiful, flowing book of poems! Or, what a beautiful, flowing long poem! Marked only by numbers, these poems form a monologue, addressed to "Boss" (i.e. God). Sometimes the narrator describes to the Boss the world around him, sometimes he directly addresses the Boss, and sometimes he asks the Boss questions, challenges him, waits for answers. But all the time, throughout the poems, there is a sense of reverence for the world, a kind of praise that isn't a prayer. Lovely.

[Rita Quillen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Other than Midquest (Fred Chappell) I can't think of a book of poetry in my lifetime that so blew my mind in its originality...true genius originality--not deliberate obfuscation (baffling us with b.s.)--not pretentiousness( this requires a reader's guide and T.S. Eliot worthy notes). Just...divine. Like the 'boss'-aka God- that this audacious poet talks to, harangue, questions, teases
throughout this brilliant book.. :-)

[Jonathan Hiskes · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Kentucky farmhand addresses a subject named only as Boss in these plainspoken unpunctuated poems. Lively, testy, interrogative, playful. I've heard Manning read at a house party in Bloomington, and knowing his sloooow cadence really helps hear the music in these lines.

thank you Boss O thank you
for the yellow-belly sun for
the moon fatter than a tick
thank you for the season
thank you for the long-leg
shadows Boss

[Kaylie · Rating 4 out of 5]

i was going to give this one three stars, but the last handful of poems brought it back up to four.
i'm not what you might call "religious," but i appreciated these poems nonetheless. keenly beautiful in their observance of nature, refuting the idea that what is simple cannot be deep and meaningful and profound. if i could give the final poem a kiss, i would. i waited the entire book for that last line.

[Cary · Rating 5 out of 5]

So I've been reading a lot of this guy. Anyway, this book probably changed the course of my inner-life a little bit, not mentioning the impact it's had on my own poetry. Anyway...

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I gobbled this collection of 78 numbered persona poems in one sitting. As they perform repetitive tasks, farmers have a lot of time to contemplate the universal and the particular, and the farmer in this collection brings his intimate concerns directly to Boss, his name for God. This irreverent naming sets the tone for his questioning, questing, praise, and thanksgiving. The poems have no punctuation, the vocabulary is simple, and lines are short—often six syllables. Yet the sentences circle around like someone speaking aloud to a friend, and the metaphors are extended, so I read the book aloud to myself in order to puzzle out the sentences. Reading the collection this way was deeply rewarding: allowing me to see the play on the page while hearing the pacing of a sentence with its internal and end rhymes and its interruptions. One note, this farmer is one of a romanticized past, with a horse-drawn plow and lanterns and wicks and all the time in the world to contemplate the fox running the fence line, the hawk in the air.

[Evan Ziegenfus]

do you get happy Boss do you
get tickled by a funny bird
or doubled over by a tree
a lonesome tree less lonely Boss
because it has a horse beside it
it doesn’t matter if the horse
is rubbing anything or not
as long as it’s beside the tree
so simple Boss a horse beside
a tree it makes me happy just
to think about two things beside
each other the stick beside the fire
the rock beside the water O
the snow beside the sleepy field
O Boss the moss beside my mouth
when I bend down to say it’s me
you mossy bank you happy piece
of green it’s me beside you like
a bird I thought I’d let you know
in case you don’t have eyes I thought
I’d tell you Boss what always leaves
me happy if you didn’t know
already Boss in case you spend
a lot of time beside yourself


-Manning, “VI”

[Michael Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bucolics is striking in its beauty and originality. I could hardly wait to finish one poem so that I could go on to the next, until I had experienced all of them. At the same time, I wanted to linger over each poem, to take as much advantage as my mind could manage of the openness each offered for varied and alternate phrasings, which, in turn, multiplied the experience of each. Maurice Manning's Bucolics is, to me, to be experienced in a way that is richer than just the reading of it.

[Jamie Dougherty · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25 stars. This reminded me a lot of a Terrence Malick movie, particularly Days of Heaven and Tree of Life. Classical philosophical and theological questions from the voice of a tenant farmer.

Favorites:
what color is your collar Boss
do you get happy Boss do you
if you had a feed sack Boss what
the light inside the shadow how
I like the weaving bees I like
did you teach the woodpecker how
is there another sky besides
O boss of ashes boss of dust
are you against me Boss
if I didn't know you better Boss

[Seth Grindstaff · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite book of poetry. Maybe my favorite book.

The speaker's conversation with the idea of the invisible but ever present "Boss" (God) moves me. The book faces the most important question: is God real.

Playful, Ecclesiastical and Job like, and filled with a naive speaker creating killer metaphors.

This is the book I hand to people if they like poetry or epistemology.

[Chelsie · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my poetry teachers told me to read this around a year ago, and then when I recently heard Mr. Manning read, I decided I should finally get around to it. These are like psalms for the nature lover, and they are absolutely wonderful. I adored this collection, and it often made me want to cry. All the stars!

[Insert name here · Rating 1 out of 5]

Tedious, prosaic, and bland. The worst of contemporary poetry. I hate the trend of highly educated academics who write boring, self-indulgent/naval-gaze prose, give it line breaks, and then act like it's not only poetry, but somehow worth reading.

[Nita · Rating 4 out of 5]

I heard a reading by Manning on the KCPL poetry podcast so I decided to check out some of his work. I loved this and how it read. The themes hit close to home, too. Well done!