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9780917788215 Academic Inspection Copy

Groundwork

  • ISBN-13: 9780917788215
  • Publisher: OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS
    Imprint: OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS
  • By Robert Morgan
  • Price: AUD $42.99
  • Stock: 0 in stock
  • Availability: This book is temporarily out of stock, order will be despatched as soon as fresh stock is received.
  • Local release date: 02/05/2026
  • Format: Paperback (235.00mm X 152.00mm) 72 pages Weight: 0g
  • Categories: Poetry by individual poets [DCF]
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Published in 1979 by Gnomon Press In Groundwork, Robert Morgan offers a vivid poetic excavation of Appalachian life, memory, and landscape. Drawing deeply from his upbringing in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, Morgan crafts a collection that is both intimate and elemental. These poems explore the textures of rural existence-its labor, rituals, and natural rhythms-through language that is spare, musical, and richly evocative. Morgan's verse is rooted in place, yet it transcends regionalism through its mythic resonance and emotional clarity. He sifts through family lore, childhood recollections, and local history to recover what he calls "pieces of the morgenland"-a personal and cultural terrain shaped by hardship, resilience, and wonder. The poems in Groundwork are populated by grandparents, farmers, and mountain folk, rendered with a quiet reverence that elevates the everyday to the numinous. This collection marks a foundational moment in Morgan's career, establishing the poetic voice that would inform his later fiction and nonfiction. With titles like "Mountain Bride," "Burning the Hornet's Nest," and "Baptism of Fire," the poems evoke both the physical and spiritual dimensions of Appalachian life. Groundwork remains one of Morgan's most concentrated and enduring tributes to the Southern mountains and their people. Essential for readers of American poetry, Appalachian studies, and environmental literature, Groundwork is a lyrical testament to the power of memory and place.
Robert Morgan grew up on a small farm in the Green River Valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, the setting of almost all his creative work. He has had four National Endowment for the Arts fellowships as well as Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation fellowships. He has also received the North Carolina Award for Literature, as well as the James B. Hanes Poetry Prize from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He is the author of ten volumes of poetry as well as his three well-received novels: The Hinterlands, The Truest Pleasure, and Gap Creek.
"Groundwork is a book wholly focused on his people and his place and their stories: it is his most purely Appalachian book, and possibly the best single book of lyric poems ever to come out of the Southern mountains. Like any masterpiece it creates its own secondary world-palpable, intriguing, and memorable." - Michael McFee "A storyteller with an eye for detail, impeccable ear for language, devotion to craft and passion for truth, Robert Morgan has written poetry and fiction of great distinction for many years." - Citation by the American Academy of Arts and Letters
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