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The Gone and the Going Away Maurice Manning 9780547939957 Books

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The Gone and the Going Away Maurice Manning 9780547939957 Books

That's the first line of the first poem in THE GONE AND THE GOING AWAY. With fifty-two poems in "this little book", Maurice Manning commemorates the already vanished and the vanishing people and places of rural Kentucky, from which, I gather, he hails.

More than half the poems contain only six lines, grouped in two- or three-line "stanzas". Many of these are good-natured; a few are cryptic. As a whole, these six-liners didn't do much for me. Here is a representative one, entitled "The Man Who Ate the Collard Greens".

And danged if I didn't
eat the hell out of

some collards. I even hollered,
Hiyah, big woman! No telling

what all I cooked up
next I was so happy.

Nineteen of the poems are relatively long, from one to six pages, and in free verse. They constitute the reason to read THE GONE AND THE GOING AWAY. Some of these also are good-natured, heart-warming, and fun, but others are sad and elegiac; a few are mysterious. My favorite -- which really could be viewed as a prose story with its lines broken and formatted to resemble a poem -- is "The Hour of Power and the Sassafras Tree". It contains the following lines:

* * * And I should stop
remembering; it only makes
me sad. I can't undo what did
or didn't happen; either way
it's sad, something I hope God
explains one day. * * *

Manning's poetry is accessible. I can't make up my mind whether or not it is contrived. If you like the simple things and people of America, or if you think you would have fit in better one hundred years ago than you do today, THE GONE AND THE GOING AWAY is a book of poetry to consider.


Tags : The Gone and the Going Away [Maurice Manning] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. <DIV>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.<BR><BR>In Fog Town Holler men have “funny names,Maurice Manning,The Gone and the Going Away,Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,0547939957,American - General,American Contemporary Poetry - Individual Poets,POETRY American General,Poetry,Poetry by individual poets

The Gone and the Going Away Maurice Manning 9780547939957 Books Reviews

Delightfully rich language captured before it fades into the landscape from which it originated. Read it aloud
outside walking in the woods
Another book by Maurice Manning! Let nobody miss this poet. You feel so happy as you read his work.He warms your heart - and your spirit as well.I bought this book- and all his others- at .
This is the first book I've read by Maurice Manning and I enjoyed it very much. Since I come from the same region in Kentucky, I could easily identify with and image the characters in his poems/stories. Wonderful bits of wisdom, pretty images, hard truths. I'll be checking out this author's other works.
Pullitzer finalist Maurice (pronounced "Morris") Manning's latest volume of poetry, THE GONE AND THE GOING AWAY, continues ideas and themes from THE COMMON MAN (2010), preserving a rural Kentucky setting and offering perspectives on community and place uncharacteristic of our times. If one is concerned that this volume is merely a collection of folksy nostalgia yearning for good ol' days, then that person misses the point. These poems are incidentally Appalachian in a way; certainly, they participate in Appalachian culture, but their jist comes from a celebration of a greater appreciation of the wonder of living. This collection offers consideration of a Creator, but not the hide-bound one learned of in a conventional service. In "The Lord God Made It All A Boogaloo," the speaker muses, "God help anyone who can't admire / a woman's jiggle. God help those men / who tear creation down, who don't / imagine anything"--people who, in a word, do not continue the appreciation of all facets of creation and co-create it along with the Maker by working their own imaginations. In these lines reminiscent of Wordsworth (the co-creator part) and Whitman (the celebration of all aspects of creation part), we find Manning's speakers loving the world, catching fleeting moments of realization.

Manning mixes approaches to his theme. Frequently, his speakers dream, relating what they have seen, sometimes with poignancy ("The Burying Ground," for example, that offers insight into the interrelation of mourning, desire, and praise), sometimes with seeming determination to develop a more outlandish story ("The Great Kentucky River Steamboat Dream"). At times, they offer spontaneous praise "The Lord is with you, / Roney; also with your gal-- // she's Daisy, right? Daisy Laswell-- / good Lord; Your chickens, too; // your ridge, your very shade-- / Creation's cloud burst forth, made" ("The Grace of Roney Laswell"). The poem defines a blessing in everyday life, a blessing echoed through the volume.

One finds contemplative and fun language in Manning's volume, and his verse, while satisfying in the reading, benefits a great deal from being read aloud. From the Hopkins-like play on verb sounds ("The Work Song" opens with the lines "The sun's done singed me-- / not sing, see, singed!--Well, / I've sung a few"), the smile-inducing, old-fashioned exclamations ("yahoo," "toodle-oo," "gitchy-goo"), to the gentlest sibiliance of an affirmative line (from "The Nature of Things" "Yes / has always been the answer, Yes / unsaid, but even the unsaid says . . . ."), Manning offers a range of music in his poems.

In the title poem of this volume, Manning writes, "The world / I live in now feels flattened out; / it isn't simple or difficult, / it is a world of wanting more, / but tired of having all it has." His poems do not call for a retreat to the past--this same poem explicitly talks about how the speaker's past has been "soaked in sadness." His poems instead call for an appreciation of the unfolding life around us.

Certainly not a religious book in the conventional sense, Manning's THE GONE AND THE GOING AWAY has been one of the more life-affirming books I have read in a long while; those who have read BUCOLICS and THE COMMON MAN will be pleased to find Manning's latest volume familiar and better. He is not one to rest on his accomplishments.
That's the first line of the first poem in THE GONE AND THE GOING AWAY. With fifty-two poems in "this little book", Maurice Manning commemorates the already vanished and the vanishing people and places of rural Kentucky, from which, I gather, he hails.

More than half the poems contain only six lines, grouped in two- or three-line "stanzas". Many of these are good-natured; a few are cryptic. As a whole, these six-liners didn't do much for me. Here is a representative one, entitled "The Man Who Ate the Collard Greens".

And danged if I didn't
eat the hell out of

some collards. I even hollered,
Hiyah, big woman! No telling

what all I cooked up
next I was so happy.

Nineteen of the poems are relatively long, from one to six pages, and in free verse. They constitute the reason to read THE GONE AND THE GOING AWAY. Some of these also are good-natured, heart-warming, and fun, but others are sad and elegiac; a few are mysterious. My favorite -- which really could be viewed as a prose story with its lines broken and formatted to resemble a poem -- is "The Hour of Power and the Sassafras Tree". It contains the following lines

* * * And I should stop
remembering; it only makes
me sad. I can't undo what did
or didn't happen; either way
it's sad, something I hope God
explains one day. * * *

Manning's poetry is accessible. I can't make up my mind whether or not it is contrived. If you like the simple things and people of America, or if you think you would have fit in better one hundred years ago than you do today, THE GONE AND THE GOING AWAY is a book of poetry to consider.