At their finest, his stripped-down and almost primitive sentences burn with the raw, lonesome pathos of Hank Williams's best songs.

Reminiscent of James Dickey- bearing the same naturalistic marks of clear, clean prose and often disturbing imagery... Morgan casts a stark story peopled with real, believable, and honest characters.

[Robert Morgan] is a seasoned author whose prose reads like poetry and whose nonfiction reads like novels... His books teach and inspire. He gives the past, with all its heroes and villains, a new life, if not a new purpose.

One of Robert Morgan's chief claims on our attention is the backbone he puts into the backcountry lore that grounds his work, the stately proprieties and meditative gravity he hews out of the hardscrabble folkways of his native Blue Ridge Mountains... His is a fine-grained, self-implicating intelligence that can span the intricacies of both pine resin and pantoums.

Morgan has contributed so much to the health of southern poetry over the last thirty-five years that the southerness of his work is axiomatic... [His] reputation is made, in no small part, on the strength of his ear, with which he has produced some of the most sonorous poems in the language.