The Common Man Maurice Manning 9780544303393 Books
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The Common Man Maurice Manning 9780544303393 Books
"The Common Man" celebrates the common in a way that it becomes very uncommon while remaining within easy grasp of even young readers. Manning is a poetry man and a manly poet. I was floored by the way he worked the couplet form (I believe it is called loose iambic tetrameter, but I read it on a publisher's site and I'm not sure what that means.) This book was a finalist for the Pulitzer, but I'm not bothering to find out who won that year. I don't care. I'm not prone to enjoy being reminded of God. I know I'm supposed to think about Him, but I don't very much. Manning slips in small references that are humorous without being a joke, or tender without being sentimental or preachy, or just full-out unique and refreshing. I cannot say how accessible the language is in this book. All those folks who say they don't "get" poetry should read this. Just beautiful. I'm reminded a tiny little bit of Billy Collins, but that's another story.Product details
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The Common Man Maurice Manning 9780544303393 Books Reviews
maurice manning has a penchant for spaced couplets, a penchant and a flair. a mastery. here there are thirty nine couplets, unrhymed, mostly iambic. tensile lines bearing tall tale, fable, family anecdote, a bit of a limerick, a suggestion of song, talking animals, insects and vegetables, ironic persiflage, and landscape description - breathtaking spans so light his prehensile construction breathes an air of magic.
more to his credit, manning knows his place and respects those who came before him and their way of life. he has a good ear for channeling the voices from his past of rural kentucky, mountain country, hill country, and if I may say so, hillbilly country, and transcribing those voices to the page for a highly readable volume of poems. and there's nothing mean about the way manning handles dialect and idiom, carefully saving what scraps he can from obscurity before they have completed disappeared.
`Well, this is nothing new, nothing
to rattle the rafters in the noggin,'
`does anyone still say he runs
a right smart cattle? ...'
`You people don't know the half of it!
How many words are gone forever,
no syllable or sound remains;
how many stories die on the lips
of the teller? ...'
`Emptying a rain gauge ....he said, Yep.
And there it was, a nip of Yep
To bring me back to the wondrous world, ...'
I've been reading and writing poetry for a long time, and the more I write, the more I wonder about the "rules." I wonder why the writers spend so much time rearranging prose into poetry. I wonder about line breaks, and rhythm, compression, and all the rest. I wonder about the old coots in colleges who haven't read a poem of value since the 1950's, or before. Then I start writing and quit wondering because I know what I'm after. Or I start reading, and try to be patient enough to find what I'm after. I'm not as sensitive as Emily Dickinson, so poems don't take the top of my head off, but a good poem will stop my breath, and a really good poem alters my heart beat. Forms and rules fall away to the revealed truth.
In this collection, "The Common Man," Maurice Manning has found a form and a vernacular that reveals the truth behind, and with his Appalachian characters. It's a milieu that could be easy stereotyped, or mocked, but Mr. Manning does neither, and though he may get a little too close to romanticizing the poor and uneducated, the poems contain enough native wit to keep them on track. There are poems in this collection that caught my breath, there are two or three that gave my heart a jolt. There's one, A Wavering Spindle of Forsythia, that took me out of body, back to my Pennsylvania boyhood, and that I wish I had written.
The Common Man gets four stars, verging on five. Highly recommended!
amazing rhythms within an authentic idiom. Wonderful to read.
It takes until the second reading to fully grasp the power of this collection --its lyrical mesage about the people of rural Kentucky and the life lead there. Beautiful stuff here, and in an unusual voice that is both casual and urgent. A definite read-aloud book, especially if one has a southern accent and nice, slow manner of speaking!
This particular book took over three weeks to arrive -- I believe it came from very far away. . .
You don't need my review to back up a Pulitzer finalist. But I love the malleable couplets in this collection--Manning uses them in a variety of ways. I also love the way stories are presented, reminiscent of the tall tales of days gone by, and the way that draws the reader in. The reader is never sure just what to believe, and that is refreshing in this age of hyper-adherence to realism.
You can Google the book and find some of these poems published online; the rest of the collection doesn't disappoint. I've dog eared several and gone back and read them over a dozen times. Maurice has a unique rhythm to his lines, doesn't ham the vernacular, and you kind of wind through in a subtle way before something deeper pops out of the verse. It's a rewarding read. I want to collect more of his books, but I'm still ruminating on this one for a while.
"The Common Man" celebrates the common in a way that it becomes very uncommon while remaining within easy grasp of even young readers. Manning is a poetry man and a manly poet. I was floored by the way he worked the couplet form (I believe it is called loose iambic tetrameter, but I read it on a publisher's site and I'm not sure what that means.) This book was a finalist for the Pulitzer, but I'm not bothering to find out who won that year. I don't care. I'm not prone to enjoy being reminded of God. I know I'm supposed to think about Him, but I don't very much. Manning slips in small references that are humorous without being a joke, or tender without being sentimental or preachy, or just full-out unique and refreshing. I cannot say how accessible the language is in this book. All those folks who say they don't "get" poetry should read this. Just beautiful. I'm reminded a tiny little bit of Billy Collins, but that's another story.
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