2016
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
Morgan’s career as a poet. In early collections, such as Zirconia Poems (1969) and Red Owl (1972), Morgan had crafted “object poems” written in spare, tight lines under extreme compression. Water tanks, zircon mines, fences, and toolsheds display their lyric materiality through a poetic vision throbbing with intensity. Morgan’s shift to more conversational and communal poems in Land Diving: New Poems00 (1976) and Groundwork (1979) allowed him to return imaginatively to the terra firma of his childhood and the tensions between the poet’s innate love of nature and his culture’s fundamentalist focus on life beyond this mortal coil. At the Edge of the Orchard Country and Sigodlin show Morgan’s balancing of these tensions in a “spirit level” that blends faith and doubt, physical and spiritual leanings, in well wrought poems that break new ground for his poetic expression. Working with a taut syllabic form (often in eightor ten-syllable lines) in combination with free verse rhythms, the poems in Sigodlin expand in ways beyond the poet’s previous work while maintaining their tight construction. In the titular poem – a carpentry term meaning “out of plumb or out of square” – Morgan confers elemental and mystic power to the architecture of his poetic form. “Sigodlin,” or rather “anti-sigodlin,” which “meant upright and square, at proper / angles as a structure should be, true to / spirit level, plumb line, erect and sure / from the very center of the earth,” performs as Morgan’s ars poetica where syllabic lines, formal design, and common speech “yoked perfectly” show the dimensions themselves, each mated pair of timbers to embody and enact the crossing of space in its real extensions, the vertical to be the virtual pith of gravity, horizontal aligned with the surface of the planet at its local tangent.
Morgan’s desire to believe in a non-denominational spirituality or presence, mostly absent in earlier poems, finds expression through mathematical, geometric, and ancient mysteries couched in construction metaphors in this poem:
RIGHT The opening spread of Rebecca Godwin’s interview with Robert Morgan in NCLR 2014, which featured North Carolina war literature
and what they fitted and nailed or mortised into place, downright and upstanding, straight up and down and flat as water, established the coordinates forever of their place in creation’s fabric, in a word learned perhaps from masons who heard it in masonic rites drawn from ancient rosicrucians who had the term from the Greek mysteries’ love of geometry’s power to say, while everything in the real may lean just the slightest bit sigodlin or oblique, the power whose center is everywhere.
The poems in Book One of Sigodlin run rife with evanescent energies, traces of actant powers, and mysteries of perception, from the blended notes of “Audubon’s Flute” to “Jet Trails” and “Inertia” to “Radiator Pressure” and “Spirit Level.” Other poems stage the mysteries of human perception, a trope Morgan maneuvers with great lyricism and penetrating imagery. These poems may trace the ethereality of unheard melodies (“Hawthornden Castle”), a momentary glimpse through temporal barriers (“Rearview Mirror”), or intellectual visions of the astrophysical (“Shadow Matter”), but the stamp of Morgan’s poetic vision is always firmly rooted in the land itself. The final poem in Book One, “Vietnam Memorial,” makes this clear: “What we see first seems a shadow / or a retaining wall in the park,” the poet reveals as “a wedge into the earth, a ramp of names driven into the nation’s green.” Even though the black wall becomes a “mirror of names many / as the text of a book published in stone,” Morgan never forgets the sheer physicality of the monument that “runs on and on through the ground in both directions.” Book Two of Sigodlin opens with the stark and surprising anagram poem “Mountain Graveyard” that also foregrounds human activity in the natural world. COURTESY OF NCLR; DESIGN BY DANA EZZELL GAY
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