Author Description

"The first full-length collection in more than a decade from the award-winning poet and author of the bestselling novel Gap Creek. Robert Morgan has won acclaim for sonorous poems rooted in his native Blue Ridge Mountains that feature taut, forceful, often haunting imagery and carefully chiseled phrases. The poems in Terroir build on his earlier work but reach out in several new directions, exploring memory, family narratives, the natural world of trees and forest animals, and the poetry of work. Readers of Morgan's fiction will recognize many places, themes, and voices, while fans of his poetry will see a fresh energy in poems drawing on science and folklore, Native American history, and music. These elegantly written poems celebrate everything from the bonds of friendship and community to the fleeting sparkle of a drop of rain, discovering wonder in the local and familiar, the sacred in the everyday. "-- "Robert Morgan is best known for his novels, particularly Gap Creek, which was an Oprah Book Club Pick and a New York Times bestseller when it was published in 1999, but he has also been writing poems for over four decades and has carved out a place for himself as one of today's top contemporary poets, acclaimed for sonorous poems that feature taut, forceful, often haunting imagery and carefully chiseled phrases. Much of his work is a love song to the Appalachian mountain terrain and hardscrabble folk ways of his native Blue Ridge Mountains; Like Robert Frost, he takes the natural world as a metaphorical base for human projection. This new collection gathers 80 new poems that eloquently depict the intricacies of nature and how they are subjected to the world of man. Morgan casts each poem with elegance and a rare sense of wonder, turning minute observations of the commonplace into portraits of delicate and significant beauty"--