Böcker av Cindy Hunter Morgan

In Far Company, we hear Cindy Hunter Morgan thinking about the many ways we carry the natural world inside of us as a kind of embedded cartography. Many of these poems commune not only with lost ancestors but also past poets. We hear conversations with Emily Dickinson, James Wright, Walt Whitman, and W. S. Merwin. These poets, who are part of Hunter Morgan's poetic lineage, are beloved figures in the far company she keeps, but the poems she writes are distinctly hers. Poet Larissa Szporluk remarked, "e;The poems in this collection are quiet and deceptively simple. My first response was to be amazed by a seeming innocence in delivery-straightforward, picturesque, and compassionate-that then matured like a crystal into something precious and masterful. We are left with the whole forest having met all the trees one by one. There is so much respect in this collection-respect for natural processes that include intergenerational relationships, shared territories, and myths."e; The poems in Far Company reveal a mind and a heart negotiating both self and world with compassion and invention. They are cinematic in the way they navigate loss, memory, dislocation, hope, and love-abstractions evoked in deeply specific and nuanced ways. There is the drone that flies over Hunter Morgan's grandparents' farm before the house burns and the stag-handled knife in a pocket, its single blade "e;folded inside like a secret"e; on a train in Greece. But this collection is full of quieter cinema, too-a grandfather bending to cinch the girth of a horse, days "e;green / with snap peas and wild tendrils,"e; and "e;raindrops beading like sweat / on the lips of snapdragons."e; The root of this book is Hunter Morgan's love for family and her love for the land her family has shared. These poems map a journey to many places, inward and outward, and engage with the natural world and the built world, moving between both of those environments in ways that acknowledge the complexities of such crossings. Often melancholic but never sentimental, this collection belongs with any reader who seeks out literature in the organic world.

Harborless, a collection of poems informed by Great Lakes shipwrecks, is part history and part reinvention. The poems explore tragic wrecks in rivers and lakes, finding and forming artistic meaning from destruction and death. Each poem begins in a real, historical moment that Cindy Hunter Morgan transforms into an imagined truth. The imaginative element is essential to this work as it provides a previously unseen glimpse into the lives affected by shipwrecks. The poems in Harborless confront the mysteries surrounding the objects that cover the floor of the Great Lakes by both deepening our understanding of the unknown and teaching great empathy for a life most of us will never know. Morgan creates a melodic and eerie scene for each poem, memorializing ships through lines such as, "e;Fishermen wondered why they caught Balsam and Spruce / their nets full of forests, not fish,"e; and "e;They touched places light could not reach."e; Most of the poems are titled after the name of a ship, the year of the wreck, and the lake in which the ship met disaster. The book's time frame spans from wrecks that precede the Civil War to those involving modern ore carriers. Throughout this collection are six "e;Deckhand"e; poems, which give face to a fully imagined deckhand and offer a character for the reader to follow, someone who appears and reappears, surfacing even after others have drowned. Who and what is left behind in this collection speaks to finality and death and "e;things made for dying."e; Very little is known when a ship sinks other than the obvious: there was a collision, a fire, a storm, or an explosion. Hunter works to fill in these gaps and to keep these stories alive with profound thoughtfulness and insight. Tony Hoagland said that one of the powers of poetry is to locate and assert value. This collection accomplishes that task through history and imagination, producing lake lore that will speak to historians and those interested in ships, poetry, and the Great Lakes.