By Robert Morgan
Robert Morgan is one of America’s greatest living poets and writers of prose fiction and biography, and we are delighted to offer four new poems by him for the premiere of Appalachian Places. Readers familiar with his poetry will recognize his love for musical instruments, his deep knowledge of scientific phenomena, and the recurring presence of Uncle Robert, who appears in many of Morgan’s poems and stories. Each of these new pieces also features a relatively recent development in his poetry: the appearance of the rhyming end-couplet, which offers a startling sense of recognition and natural fulfillment to the poems. Morgan is a native of Zirconia, North Carolina, just outside Hendersonville. He has been called “the poet laureate of Appalachia,” and we believe these new poems demonstrate the ongoing case for that claim.
That all the continents were joined,
were part of a maternal whole,
should not surprise us for we know
that every mortal thing will wear
away and crack and fall apart
in time. From ancient wholeness things
break down and scatter, drift around
in clash of thrust and spread. Where once
was unity is now just some
loose fragments floating off in tides
from the deep interior core,
where primal flames keep raging,
churning, belching fiery
matter from the mother fury.
Robert Morgan is Kappa Alpha Professor of English at Cornell University, where he has taught since 1971. Among his sixteen poetry collections are The Strange Attractor: New and Selected Poems (2004), October Crossing (2009), Terroir (2011), and Dark Energy (2015). His collections of short fiction include The Balm of Gilead Tree: New and Selected Stories (1999) and As Rain Turns to Snow and Other Stories (2017). He is the author of seven novels: The Hinterlands (1994), The Truest Pleasure (1995), Gap Creek (1999), This Rock (2001), Brave Enemies (2003), The Road from Gap Creek (2013), and Chasing the North Star (2016). He is also the author of two books of historical scholarship, Boone: A Biography (2007) and Lions of the West: Heroes and Villains of the Westward Expansion (2011). Among his numerous awards are Poetry’s Eunice Tietjens Prize, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the James G. Hanes Poetry Prize from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the Southern Book Critics Circle Award, the North Carolina Award for Literature, and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts.