2016
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
ROBERT MORGAN’S “BIG TALK” a review by Randall Wilhelm Robert Morgan. Dark Energy. New York: Penguin Books, 2015. —. Sigodlin. 1990, Winston-Salem, NC: Press 53, 2014.
If one listens carefully when reading the poems in Robert Morgan’s new collection, one may hear and even feel the “dark energy” of the universe trembling through its pages. For veteran readers of Morgan’s poetry this effect is not a new experience; the poet has tapped the winds of comets and the pinging of crickets in previous collections, merging the smallest sounds of the natural world with the acoustics of the cosmos in grand eloquence. The poems in his newest collection, Dark Energy, reverberate with the thunderous rumblings deep inside mountains, the hum of electricity from power lines, the music of the spheres. It is testament to Morgan’s brilliance with sound and craft that the poems in Dark Energy speak powerfully from deep within the earth and ripple over and through its surface. “Big Talk,” the collection’s first poem, sounds the note of basso profundo that plays throughout the collection:
Big Talk RANDALL WILHELM is Assistant Professor at Anderson University in Anderson, SC. He is the editor of The Ron Rash Reader (University of South Carolina Press, SC 2014), and co-editor of the forthcoming collection, also from University of South Carolina Press, Summoning the Dead: Critical Essays on Ron Rash. RO B E R T M O R G A N was bor n in Hendersonville, NC, and is now living in Ithaca, NY, where he is the Kappa Alpha Professor of English at Cornell University. He is the author of numerous books of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, and his many awards include the James G. Hanes Poetry Prize from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the North Carolina Award for Literature, and the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association’s R. Hunt Parker Memorial Award for significant contribution to North Carolina literature. He was also inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2010. Morgan has been featured regularly in NCLR over the years.
ABOVE RIGHT The first page of Patrick and Resa Bizzaro’s interview with Robert Morgan in NCLR 2001
When mountains boomed and boomed again returning echoes all along the chain, the Indians said the peaks were talking to each other in the idiom that mountains use across the mighty distances, with giant syllables and rests. White hunters feared it might be guns or even cannon natives had somehow acquired to warn them from the better hunting grounds and streams, the blasts as loud as thunder on the clearest days and coldest nights. Geologists would later hold the groans and barks inside the ridge were shelves of massive, restless rock that slipped or dropped far down within the mountain’s guts, a fracture or a crashing at some fault as part of the tectonic conversation among the continents as old as planet earth or starry birth, the gossip of creation’s work.
The poems in Dark Energy can be seen as companions to those in Morgan’s most recent previous collection, Terroir (2011; reviewed in NCLR Online 2013), and display Morgan’s continuous growth as an ever-evolving
COURTESY OF NCLR; DESIGN BY MARY HATCH THIESEN
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craftsman of form and sound. The “big talk” in Dark Energy is indeed gigantic, beyond human measure except through Morgan’s galactic ear and earth-honed voice that sound the conversation of tectonic plates with the mysteries of the universe in “giant syllables and rests.” Built mainly on his trademark eight-syllable line, these poems reveal a sense of wonder that shines with cosmic detail like the zircons that crop up repeatedly in his work. In “Neutrino,” Morgan celebrates the smallest bit of matter creation’s building speck, . . . the vast remoteness of the tiny, beyond the cell, beyond the molecule and gene, beyond the atom with its nucleus and rings, electron moons, beyond the particles, the quarks . . . to the one elusive, last . . . suspicion of substance,
that “leaves a blink / of sparkle in the dark” that we never see, “just winks where it has gone.” Many poems dramatize similar themes of astrophysical vibrations melded with human wonder that evoke a metaphysics of mystery. In “Even Me,” a young boy stands beneath power lines, mesmerized by