One Man's Dark by Maurice Manning (review)

Maurice Manning is an experienced poet. The Pulitzer Prize finalist's sixth collection of poems, One Man's Dark, is an example of strong craftsmanship: voice-driven verse with a focus on musicality and economy. Manning's lines are some of the tightest in contemporary poetry; he is a precision poet in the truest sense of the word. Efficient line-composition is an essential skill for a poet because it does all the hard work and is the foundation and structure, letting each poem offer up its unique personality.

The most successful poems in this collection are either thought-based or vision-based, using their energy to make meaning through ideas or deep images. A perfect example of the thought-based poem is "Passion" which is the second poem in the collection. It begins with an image: "All of the sumac is scarlet now / and the thistle heads have gone to silk / and around the field the goldenrod / nods in the rain, and anything / with leaves or height is lowered." Then it switches to a complex meditation on two types of rain. The speaker begins by describing the first type of rain: "I liked the constant sound and motion, / how that sound and motion eventually / became the same blurred expression." He then describes the second type of rain "that fell from the branches with less precision, / yet had an independent order, / a rain that couldn't help itself / from being strange or stirring me / to believe the first rain—steady / and unified—is necessary / for the second, the other, singular rain."

This second type of rain might be what the speaker identifies as passion, or as he puts it: "an accidental counterpart / to unity, a blind pursuit, / like all desire…" These feelings are confirmed in the major moment of the poem:

What cannot be repeated, whatwill not be uniform, what breaksaway defiantly from control—I've been a student of this art.It is one of God's better tricksTo make monotony revealing,But disruption is a subtle craft.

This is the big turn of the poem because it transforms the second rain into a metaphorical celebration of a passionate, almost anarchistic spirit that burns within the speaker. He sees himself reflected in this one simple aspect of nature. The poem is no longer a poem about rain but about the speaker himself: "Rain makes itself and makes, / through more and more, the field believes / this is eternity for now."

Other poems that follow a similar thought-pattern can be seen in "Theology," "Symbolism," "A Portion of the Cosmos in Kentucky," and "Old-Time Kentucky Salt-Kettle Dream," which is an especially stirring poem in five parts. Like "Passion," the speaker becomes meditative, but this time, darker feelings surface:

Even now I see the dry bedsuddenly gorged with rain and thenI see myself beside the stream,half-broken by my breaking passionfor seeing all things move at oncein one direction, toward the riverand, farther, toward the symbol the riverbecomes in thought…

The imaginative power of dreams is a pronounced theme throughout this collection. Here, Manning incorporates both dream and passion further along in the poem: "When I was a boy, God gave me this, / the dream to make the world whole / by my dream, and a dream before my own / remembered, like salt cooked down / in a kettle, a rick of oak beside it…." He continues:

and passion—the passionate dream, eventhe passionate, reckless act of rageor hate or consummation—comesfrom being alone, from being alonewith being alone, and being still…

These thought-based poems are full of fire and brooding magnetism. This is done by Manning at select points in the collection and they are special moments to savor.

The other kind of poem in One Man's Dark—the vision-based type—serve as companion poems to the deeper thinking poems. Pure images build on one another until the reader is stimulated into full sensory consciousness. This happens in "Patch...