From church barn to apple orchard, from snow-covered pasture to secret moonshine cabin, Mannings Snakedoctor reinvigorates the Kentucky pastoral through poems that find light in shadow, good in evil, love in a fathers stinging blow.Maurice Manning returns to the Kentucky countryside in his eighth collection, Snakedoctor. Existing between haunting memory and pastoral dreamscape, this quiet collection showcases Mannings storytelling at its finest. Simple, four-beat lines hold epiphaniesthe barn is just an empty church and announce visits from seven-foot strangers named Mr. True. Here, God is reimagined as a serious banjo player who calls the world to sing. And sing Manning does. Through rhyme, blues, and haiku, Snakedoctor trains our ears to hear music in the mundane, to find beauty all around us: in the annotated margins of a well-read book, the flight of a fathers shadow puppet, the yellow centers of daisies. Punctuated by rains pitter-patter on a tin wash tub, and the ring of lonely in a farmers voice as he calls his cattle home, Snakedoctor is a collection that will leave you wanting to dog-ear its pages. From childhood to fatherhood, church barn to apple orchard, moonshine to moonbeam, we leave these poems understanding Mannings wish: I wanted to make a prayer and I did, / in half-sleep after the dream.
