The One Abiding - Softcover

Frederick Morgan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1586540211 ISBN 13: 9781586540210

Publisher: Story Line Press, 2002

Synopsis

The tenth book of poems by an American master.

This book of poems will make you vibrantly reflective. With the wisdom and technical grace reminiscent of the great poets of any golden age (Greece and China come to mind), Morgan in his 80th year explores memory and spirituality, beginnings and inevitable endings, love, the mysteries of life, and the mystery that awaits after life is done.

Frederick Morgan, a lifelong New Yorker, co-founded The Hudson Review in 1947 and served as its editor for 50 years. A Princeton graduate, he served in the Tank Destroyer Corps of the U.S. Army during World War II. In 1984, he was named a Chevalier de l'ordre des Arts des Lettres by the French government.

About this title

Reviews

*Starred Review* Like the late Amy Clampitt, Morgan didn't publish a book of verse until relatively late in life. Like her, he was immediately recognized as uncommonly good. Unlike her, he already had a large literary reputation as a founding editor of the Hudson Review, one of the greatest American literary quarterlies. Unlike hers, his poetry is immediately accessible, though not at the expense of formal elegance and psychological resonance. His new collection surveys his now long life (he is 80), but it is personal poetry in the universalizing manner of Coleridge in "Frost at Midnight" and of classical Japanese poetry: it discloses transpersonal meaning in individual, autobiographical experiences. The poems of childhood in the first of the book's five sections cite real things and happenings to evoke common emotions and then evaluate them as cogently as any other searing and reflective mind might, as in the exquisite "Washington Square," concerned with childhood existential realizations and adult nostalgia. Subsequent sections contain poems about love affairs and friendship, the life of the senses, real and imaginary journeys made to evade as well as discover, and long life and its conclusions. Such characterizations fail to suggest how Morgan's precision makes the scenes he conjures, even those of dreams, and the feelings he rouses vivid, affecting, and, perhaps, indelible. Ray Olson
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Edition details

• Publisher: Story Line Press
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1586540211
• ISBN 13: 9781586540210
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 70