Dark Energy Poems [Paperback]

A new collection from the awardwinning poet and author of the bestselling novelGap Creek

In the words ofPoetrymagazine, Robert Morgan’s poems “shine with beauty that transcends locale.” The work in his newest collection, rooted in his native Blue Ridge Mountains, explores the mysteries and tensions of family and childhood, the splendors and hidden dramas of the natural world, and the agriculture that supports all culture. Morgan’s voice is vigorous and exact, opening doors for the reader, finding unexpected images and connections. The poems reach beyond surfaces, to the strange forces inside atoms, our genes, our heritage, and outward to the farthest movements of galaxies, the dark energy we cannot explain but recognize in our bones and blood, in our deepest memories and imagination.ROBERT MORGAN’s books include Boone, a biography of Daniel Boone, Gap Creek (an Oprah Book Club pick), and the poetry collection Terroir. The recipient of an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he lives in Ithaca, New York.

• CONTENTS

• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ONE

Big Talk

When mountains boomed and boomed again

returning echoes all along

the chain, the Indians said the peaks

were talking to each other in

the idiom that mountains use

across the mighty distances,

with giant syllables and rests.

White hunters feared it might be guns

or even cannon natives had

somehow acquired to warn them from

the better hunting grounds and streams,

the blasts as loud as thunder on

the clearest days and coldest nights.

Geologists would later hold

the groans and barks inside the ridge

were shelves of massive, restless rock

that slipped or dropped far down within

the mountain’s guts, a fracture or

a crashing at some fault as part

of the tectonic conversatiol+