Snakedoctor

"Manning is at his best in quiet moments of stunning lyricism... 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'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." -Publishers Weekly

"He nails his images the way a restless boy, up in a tree with a slingshot, nails anything sentient that wanders into view." -The New York Times Book Review

"Myth-making is a more important business than what's true and false, and Manning's ability to transcend the problem so blithely on the strength of his overall conception is impressive." -Contemporary Poetry Review

"[W]ithin a few lines, the language becomes layered and hints at the constant intersection of the present and the eternal." -The Washington Post

"A gifted storyteller who slights neither the physical world nor the metaphysical... Maurice Manning is a major American poet speaking from the heart of Appalachia." -Appalachian Heritage

"Manning's lines are some of the tightest in contemporary poetry; he is a precision poet in the truest sense of the word. Efficient line-composition is an essential skill for a poet because it does all the hard work and is the foundation and structure, letting each poem offer up its unique personality." -Pleiades

"There's something Taoist about Maurice Manning. Close your eyes and he's wandering around the 6th Century BCE landlocked Henan province instead of the Twenty-first Century Kentucky countryside, philosophizing about love, time, art, remembering poignant folk stories about moonshiners, his father and grandfather, all in the context of lush and lonely rural Kentucky, musing, generally, about existence and how we fit in."-Charles Rammelkamp, The Lake