OCTOBER CROSSING - Poetry by Robert Morgan
Publication Date: September 15, 2009
Paperback
ISBN: 978-0-9802117-1-9
Best-selling author Robert Morgan's poetry exploring and celebrating the culture and curiosities of his native Appalachia.
Praise for Robert Morgan's October Crossing
About the Author
Photo by Rimas Zailskas
"Any new collection of poems by Robert Morgan is a gift, and October Crossing is wonderful through and through. In the past thirty years I have learned a great deal from this man, who is exemplary as a poet, as a prose writer, and as a human being.
—Ted Kooser
"Robert Morgan's poems are always exciting for their precise knowledge of country things, and of how things go in the world of natural fact and process. This new collection gives us also some delightful lore from the Southern mountains: we learn of the horse fiddle, and holy cussing, and the intrepid pastor who held off bear or panther with his umbrella."
—Richard Wilbur
"Forty years after the publication of his first book,Robert Morgan makes this remarkable October Crossing. 'Beating back the blackest shadows…to the pulse of clap and laughter,' he surely earns the collection’s final prospect: 'years ahead / as golden as the leaves on hickories.'"
—Robert West
"The best poems in October Crossing sound so fresh and strong that it is hard to believe that Robert Morgan’s first book, Zirconia Poems, came out in 1969, forty years ago. Morgan’s distinctive voice still sounds much the same, honest and straight, but always with new subtleties and a willingness to move into new country. Like Thomas Wolfe and Wallace Stevens. Robert Morgan seems to own October, and he makes the most of it, mature and original."
—William Harmon
"Morgan's October Crossing returns to the landscapes and preoccupations of the North Carolina mountains with the rich, grounded work that he does so well. Though he has taught at Cornell University for years, Morgan has never really left Appalachia for his literary work. There's music aplenty in Morgan's work, and his portraits not only capture the daily lives of the people of the North Carolina mountains but always manage to get at an even larger canvas, to find the common human story that we all share, no matter our particular location."
—Michael Chitwood, Raleigh (NC) News & Observer, December 13, 2009
"Reading familiar poems from October Crossing … is similar to seeing the chain of mountains in the Blue Ridge in different lights: each view offers new vistas…. This is poetry written by a consummate authority on the region…. The poems…are filed with folklore, oral tradition, family stories, recorded facts, throwing a spotlight on a region and leaving the reader more intimately acquainted with the community."
—Karen K. Mason, North Carolina Literary Review, #22, 2013