Review of The Hungers of the World: New & Collected Later Poems (by John Morgan)

Morgan is a deft handler of the sounds and sense of language, a plain-spoken singer in the style of the Roberts-Lowell, with whom he studied, and Frost, whose themes and rhythms echo in poems like "To a Solstice Party in Fairbanks," where snowy woods on a winter evening provide the site for two diverging roads.Compare Morgan's lines, "as the day-long winter evening fades, / Orion riding shotgun on the night.// But driving isn't easy on the ice, / and up a snow-packed hill the engine falters …" with Frost's little horse who "… must think it queer / To stop without a farmhouse near / Between the woods and frozen lake / Th e darkest evening of the year."Later in Morgan's poem he fi nds himself in "an unfamiliar driveway," but "backing slowly down the drive / I try the other fork …" where he fi nds, not only his promised solstice party, but confi rmation of the rightness of his choice of adoptive home-not unlike Frost who, confronted with two roads, so famously "took the one less traveled by."Often Morgan picks up rhymes from several lines above, from a previous stanza or from mid-line, and brings them out at the end in a way that feels fi tting and satisfying without the ba-dum ba-dum of a more formal rhyme scheme.In "Mourning Cloak," for example, we feel the closure in "dead" and "away" wrapping up rhymes opened two or three stanzas above: "… a shred // of night by day.I hear the buzz of bugs / awakening to spring and watch a busy / moth, ants trailing up a branch.Like gravediggers // who forge their drastic living from the dead, / we schmoozed and argued half the night away."