The Gone And The Going Away

By Maurice Manning

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Apr 23, 2013
• ISBN: 9780547939988

Maurice Manning

MAURICE MANNING is the author of four previous books of poems. His last book, The Common Man, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship, he teaches at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky.

Book preview

The Complaint Against Roney Laswell’s Rooster

Attention, Mister Roney Laswell—Roney,

short for Tyrone, I hear—

the hour your rooster blows,

four, is two too early.

Another two would do. Go,

speak to your rooster, Roney.

The Nature of Things

This little book of grief and wonder

and dreams and the green world is real,

and I’m not the first but I’ve lately been

a listener. I’ve heard the book,

and only once or twice in the span

of many years does the book reveal

itself and say itself, and though

I am unfit at times to bear

the book, I’ve heard it nonetheless,

and, yes, it is the mystical stuff,

the dawn of the first darkness, the fire

and memory carried forth like fire,

and the swales and glades and river veins;

the land is the body of the book,

the body made by the God for the book

to be and to be the place where we

who have cursed the book live still

inside it, inside the miracle.

There is no greater revelation

than the pool of water catching the sky

and the crow-caw crossing the reflection,

and then the crow itself reflected.

But these are only words to say

the book, and the book says more than words

can say, and some of what I’ve heard

cannot be said, a silent silence.

Just as the water needs the rock,

the blind eye needs the vision:

the vision is the living book,

and the book begins before it begins.

Do Lord, O, do you remember?

I’ve asked and asked again, and Yes

has always been the answer, Yes

unsaid, but even the unsaid says;

the answer needs the question, the flood

of sorrow needs the lovely plain,

the hilltop helps hold up the sky—

the everything of everything,

the one Creation saying itself,

remembering itself forever.

I was born in a tear of joy on the face

of the One who saw me coming home;

where I was even I don’t know,

but I know there was no other way.

I had to go and find the horse

watering itself in the stream pooled

at the mouth of the cave, the underworld

unknown releasing itself to the known,

and the boy asleep in the shade and dreaming.

I had to find the true symbols;

I found the way things used to be,

and all the things, the scrape of the grass

in the wind, the butterfly drinking

the thistle-top, the owl’s eye

a steady yellow fact staring

back from a green and ghostly gloom.

In a dream my angel came to me

in the child’s-eye shape of a tree.

The Slate

Way back, the men had funny names

like Tiny, who was anything

but small, and Tiny’s son was called

Tiny Too or Double T,

and Tiny’s wife who was big and mean

was known as Honey, and everybody

called Honey’s sister Birdie, and Birdie,

who couldn’t talk much less whistle,

was beautiful but touched in the head,

so Birdie lived with them way down

in Fog Town Holler, beside

the green