In 1991 Wesleyan University Press published Robert Morgan’s first selected poems, Green River; that book gathered fifty-five poems from the seven full-length collections Morgan had published by that time, plus seven new poems. Over the next thirteen years, Morgan largely diverted his energies to writing prose fiction: a single full-length book of poetry, 2000’s Topsoil Road, was emphatically outnumbered by two short story collections and five novels. Someone familiar with the author’s bibliography might wonder, why a new selected poems now?
One reason is that Wesleyan let Green River go out of print; with the appearance of The Strange Attractor, Morgan’s newer readers—many of whom know him only as a prose writer—can again purchase a one-volume cross-section of his poetry. The Wesleyan book was too sparse a selection anyway, and moreover omitted some of Morgan’s most remarkable work. With eighty-one previously collected and fourteen new poems, The Strange Attractor is much more substantial than the book it replaces: not only is it more up-to-date, but it also does a better job of representing the earlier part of the oeuvre.
An improvement of the latter sort is the expanded selection from one of Morgan’s best books, the 1990 collection Sigodlin. Wesleyan had published Sigodlin the year before Green River appeared, and doubtless preferred not to undermine the earlier book’s sales by reprinting too much from it; as a result, Green River left out several gems now included in The Strange Attractor. Among these are “Mountain Graveyard,” a witty and surprisingly powerful poem made entirely of six pairs of anagrams; “Sidney Lanier Dies at Tryon 1881,” which evokes the poet’s last days in western North Carolina, and “The Way Back,” an account of a lost caver’s fearful struggle to regain the surface. The selection from Morgan’s 1987 collection, At the Edge of the Orchard Country, is also notably expanded.
The Strange Attractor’s new section collects highly varied work, dating both before and after Morgan’s commitment to meter in the late ’90s. Supple rhythm, alliteration, and sporadic rhyme combine to onomatopoetic effect in “Time’s Music,” a meditation on insect noises. A nonmetrical “Triolet” dazzlingly accomplishes that French form’s rhymes and repetitions while pondering the opening of the Fourth Gospel. “Legends” commemorates Thomas Wolfe’s centennial in strict trochaic tetrameter, finally becoming as incantatory as any of Wolfe’s own rhapsodic flights. The new poems eschew the kind of Appalachian cultural history for which Morgan is famous; they remind us that he is also a nature poet, an object poet, a poet interested in literature, and a poet of personal and family history.
“Nature” includes outer space: one of the new poems, “The Strange Attractor,” considers an invisible interstellar mass that tugs at the visible universe. How appropriate that Morgan should let that title double as the book’s: poetry cannot approach prose’s ability to reach an audience, yet here is a bestselling novelist re-consolidating and adding to his poetic corpus. The muse is a strange attractor indeed.
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Robert M. West