One Man’s Dark

Manning (The Gone and the Going Away) further draws from his Southern roots in his sixth collection, sketching ever more elegant pastorals of the Kentucky countryside. This setting gracefully comes alive as the corporeal and the spiritual combine: “between God’s thumb/ and famous, animating finger.” The verdant flora provides evidence of divine creation and the call of a woodcock becomes an answer to a subliminal prayer. Manning is at his best in quiet moments of stunning lyricism, describing his view from a hill as “a dark, less risen place, as if God/ left out the leavening to leave/ an uninviting place alone.” There is a deep reverence for the ancestral spirit of the land, as if Kentucky’s rich hills and flowing streams were a part of its residents’ DNA. Manning plumbs the past for his eclectic cast of characters: almost implausibly rustic overall-clad shoeless brothers plucking banjos; a man named Shadrach Creech who lived in a hollow tree; and another banjo player, named Sam-Dude, who warily advises the poet to be skeptical of a neighboring clan. There is even a brilliant allegorical poem about the righteousness of toil. Manning’s verse resonates with the plaintive loneliness of his rural landscapes and the divine presence that alleviates that loneliness, be it God, one’s forebears, or poetry. (Oct.)