A Companion For Owls: Being the Commonplace Book of D. Boone, Long Hunter, Back Woodsman, & c.

This collection of highly original narrative poems is written in the voice of frontiersman Daniel Boone and captures all the beauty and struggle of nascent America. We follow the progression of Daniel Boone's life, a life led in war and in the wilderness, and see the birth of a new nation. We track the bountiful animals and the great, undisturbed rivers. We stand beside Boone as he buries his brother, then his wife, and finds comfort in his friendship with a slave named Derry. Praised for his originality, Maurice Manning is an exciting new voice in American poetry. The darkest place I've ever been did not require a name. It seemed to be a gathering place for the lint of the world. The bottom of a hollow beneath two ridges, sunk like a stone. The water was surely old, the dregs of some ancient sea, but purified by time, like a man made better by his years, his old hurts absorbed into his soul, his losses like a spring in his breast. -from "Born Again"

A Companion for Owls: Being the Commonplace Book of D. Boone, Long Hunter, Back Woodsman, & c.

Literature & Fiction

Manning, Maurice

Poetry

Houghton, mifflin, harcourt

Bucolics

Untitled and unpunctuated, the seventy poems in this collection seem to cascade from one page to another. Maurice Manning extolls the virtues of nature and its many gifts, and finds deep gratitude for the mysterious hand that created it all. 
that bare branch that branch made black 
by the rain the silver raindrop 
hanging from the black branch 
Boss I like that black branch 
I like that shiny raindrop Boss 
tell me if I’m wrong but it makes 
me think you’re looking right 
at me now isn’t that a lark for me 
to think you look that way 
upside down like a tree frog 
Boss I’m not surprised at all 
I wouldn’t doubt it for 
a minute you’re always up 
to something I’ll say one thing 
you’re all right all right you are 
even when you’re hanging Boss

Untitled and unpunctuated, the seventy poems in this acclaimed collection seem to cascade from one page to another. Maurice Manning extolls the virtues of nature and its many gifts, and finds deep gratitude for the mysterious hand that created it all. 
that bare branch that branch made black 
by the rain the silver raindrop 
hanging from the black branch 
Boss I like that black branch 
I like that shiny raindrop Boss 
tell me if I’m wrong but it makes 
me think you’re looking right 
at me now isn’t that a lark for me 
to think you look that way 
upside down like a tree frog 
Boss I’m not surprised at all 
I wouldn’t doubt it for 
a minute you’re always up 
to something I’ll say one thing 
you’re all right all right you are 
even when you’re hanging Boss

Genre Fiction

Ecco

This year's winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Maurice Manning's Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions. These compelling poems take us on a wild ride through the life of a man child in the rural South. Presenting a cast of allegorical and symbolic, yet very real, characters, the poems have "authority, daring, [and] a language of color and sure movement," says series judge W.S. Merwin.

Lawrence Booth s Book of Visions (Yale Series of Younger Poets)

Yale University Press

This year’s winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Maurice Manning’s Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions. These compelling poems take us on a wild ride through the life of a man child in the rural South. Presenting a cast of allegorical and symbolic, yet very real, characters, the poems have “authority, daring, [and] a language of color and sure movement,” says series judge W.S. Merwin. From Seven Chimeras The way Booth makes a love story: same as a regular story, except under one rock is a trapdoor that leads to a room full of belly buttons; each must be pushed, one is a landmine. The way Booth makes hope: thirty-seven acres, Black Damon, Red Dog. Construct a pillar of fire in the Great Field and let it become unquenchable. The way Booth ends the Jack-in-the-Box charade: shoot the weasel in the neck and toss it to the buzzards. The way Booth thinks of salvation: God holding a broken abacus, colored beads falling away.

Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions (Yale Series of Younger Poets)

A Companion for Owls Being the Commonplace Book of D Boone Long Hunter Back Woodsman C

"The Common Man," Maurice Manning's fourth collection, is a series of ballad-like narratives, set down in loose, unrhymed iambic tetrameter, that honors the strange beauty of the Kentucky mountain country he knew as a child, as well as the idiosyncratic adventures and personalities of the oldtimers who were his neighbors, friends, and family. Playing off the book's title, Manning demonstrates that no one is common or simple. Instead, he creates a detailed, complex, and poignant portrait--by turns serious and hilarious, philosophical and speculative, but ultimately tragic--of a fast-disappearing aspect of American culture. "The Common Man"'s accessibility and its enthusiastic and sincere charms make it the perfect antidote to the glib ironies that characterize much contemporary American verse. It will also help to strengthen Manning's reputation as one of his generation's most important and original voices.

The Common Man

The Common Man, Maurice Manning’s fourth collection, is a series of ballad-like narratives, set down in loose, unrhymed iambic tetrameter, that honors the strange beauty of the Kentucky mountain country he knew as a child, as well as the idiosyncratic adventures and personalities of the oldtimers who were his neighbors, friends, and family. Playing off the book’s title, Manning demonstrates that no one is common or simple. Instead, he creates a detailed, complex, and poignant portrait—by turns serious and hilarious, philosophical and speculative, but ultimately tragic—of a fast-disappearing aspect of American culture.The Common Man’s accessibility and its enthusiastic and sincere charms make it the perfect antidote to the glib ironies that characterize much contemporary American verse. It will also help to strengthen Manning’s reputation as one of his generation’s most important and original voices.

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.

The Gone And The Going Away

The Blueshirts

Politics & Social Sciences

Politics & Government

Gill and Macmillan

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Manning, Maurice. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Manning, Maurice

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Manning, Maurice. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

A Companion for Owls: Being the Commonplace Book of D. Boone, Long Hunter, Back Woodsman, & c.

Bucolics

Bucolics

Lawrence Booth s Book of Visions (Yale Series of Younger Poets)

Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions (Yale Series of Younger Poets)

A Companion For Owls: Being the Commonplace Book of D. Boone, Long Hunter, Back Woodsman, & c.

The Common Man

The Common Man

The Gone And The Going Away

The Blueshirts