Dark Energy

Author of the novel Gap Creek, an Oprah Pick, Morgan writes poetry grounded in the natural world and particularly the very earth of his native Blue Ridge Mountains. (His most recent poetry collection, 2011's Terroir, attests to that.) In heartfelt, plainspoken language, his book proceeds through four sections. The first reflects largely on past natural history, explaining that of booming tectonic shifts "the Indians said the peaks/ were talking to each other in/ the idiom that mountains use/ across the mighty distances" and that with the death of the large land mammals "Eden …shrank/ to just a regular promised land/ to fit our deadly, human scale." The second section sweetly contemplates childhood ("All would be possible if I/ just got beyond the garden fence,/ …beyond my languor" and the third the splendors of nature, from seeds to sleet to hawks. The fourth is more conjectural, reflecting on the noble metals' "beauty, bright and sterile/ like everything immortal," for instance, and how the sound of hammering next door eventually creates a home.