A Companion for Owls: Being the Commonplace Book of D. Boone, Long Hunter, Back Woodsman, & c. [Hardcover]

Maurice Manning (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 6, 2004

This collection of highly original narrative poems is written in the voice of frontiersman Daniel Boone and captures all the beauty and struggle of nascent America. We follow the progression of Daniel Boone's life, a life led in war and in the wilderness, and see the birth of a new nation. We track the bountiful animals and the great, undisturbed rivers. We stand beside Boone as he buries his brother, then his wife, and finds comfort in his friendship with a slave named Derry.
Praised for his originality, Maurice Manning is an exciting new voice in American poetry.

The darkest place I've ever been
did not require a name. It seemed
to be a gathering place for the lint
of the world. The bottom of a hollow
beneath two ridges, sunk like a stone.
The water was surely old, the dregs
of some ancient sea, but purified
by time, like a man made better by
his years, his old hurts absorbed into
his soul, his losses like a spring
in his breast.
-from "Born Again"

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

*Starred Review* With this masterful interpretation of the quintessential American pioneer, Manning raises the ante for all future practitioners of one of the most fruitful kinds of long poem-sequence: the biography-in-poems. Robert Peters' treatments of Shaker founder Ann Lee (The Gift to Be Simple, 1975), explorer Elisha Kent Kane (kane, 1986), and others focused on their subjects' psychology. Joan Murray's Queen of the Mist (1999, about Annie Taylor, the first person to ride over Niagara Falls in a barrel), Jean Nordhaus' The Porcelain Apes of Moses Mendelssohn (2002), Sharon Chmielarz's The Other Mozart (2001), and Robert Cooperman's Keats sequence, Petitions for Immortality [BKL Ap 15 03], are dramatic and historical. Manning's portrayal of Daniel Boone, however, is philosophical. The semiliterate adventurer and small-time entrepreneur Boone is, per Manning, the ideal unselfish American individualist and the embodiment of that figure so earnestly admired by literary romanticism, the natural man. This may sound like the recipe for a dull read, but the individual poems, even at their most ruminative (in the opening section, "Meditations"), are exceedingly tangible and exciting, referring constantly to the material world and bodily existence and further grounded by genuine biographical events. Moreover, the most speculative aspects of Manning's enterprise, on Boone's possible inspiration of the English Romantics, appear only in an appended essay, which, however, readers ignore at their loss. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

PRAISE FOR THE POETRY OF MAURICE MANNING

"A fresh and brilliant talent."-W. S. Merwin

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 144 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (September 6, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151010498
• ISBN-13: 978-0151010493
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #766,460 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

MAURICE MANNING, the author of four collections of poetry, was awarded the 2009 Hanes Poetry Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. His first book, Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions, was selected by W. S. Merwin for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Manning, a former writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, teaches at Indiana University and Warren Wilson College.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Real McCoy, October 21, 2004

By 

Eric Reiberg (Indianapolis, IN) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Companion for Owls: Being the Commonplace Book of D. Boone, Long Hunter, Back Woodsman, & c. (Hardcover)

Perhaps I'm a dash sycophantic but, "A Companion for Owls" should contend for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. The previous reviewer must have abandoned his childhood fantasies long ago, because to give one star to this new volume points to a distinct lack of imagination. If at some point in your life you have not fantasized about being a Daniel Boone, an American alone on the frontier, surviving on wits and rifle alone, I pity you. There are few characters as quintessentially American as Boone, and Manning does a superb job issuing a voice to his persona. Because Boone spent so much of his life alone, there are great oppurtunities to fashion words for him, but also great peril if too many liberties are taken with the character. We all find a precious poetry in solitude, but rarely can it be translated to the page without it being cloying or inaccessible. Manning has found that solitude, but also a rustic sympathy that makes Boone terribly inviting. This volume is not dull. It is long, but also, comprehensive. It is prayer, memory, lamentation, regret, discovery, joy, selfishness, pain, humility, nature, urban encroachment, and most of the poems are great successes. Only 2 or 3 seem superfluous or misconceived. The end notes are a true joy. If every poet included such copious notes about their work people might not find poetry so impenetrable. And if every poet wrote verses so bright and well honed as Manning, they might not need end notes in the first place.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars On the whole, the world is level, October 10, 2007

By 

Gary Sprandel (Frankfort, Kentucky) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: A Companion for Owls: Being the Commonplace Book of D. Boone, Long Hunter, Back Woodsman, & c. (Hardcover)

This is a remarkably fun book.. a must for Kentuckians! Manning seems to be channeling D Boon, and the result is some remarkable poems as well as insights and speculations. In "The Sum Result of Speculation" is Boone's account of his land surveying ""Marking off thousand-acre parcels is a lot of paces, a lot of steps to count in your head ... I'm sad to say, walking this country for money only brought be loss; but I never once got lost.". In Sleeping in the Wilderness ... "No matter how well you dress the hide / a buffalo rug will always smell like buffalo".

From this frontier are thoughts of Boone presented about the Corp of Discoveries, Audubon, Jefferson, and 10 things he would say to Colonel Richard Henderson ("Henderson, you cur, I'll wipe that smirk right off your face.". ). The final section on "Illustrations, Inventories, and Maps" shows that Manning is also a imaginative illustrator, the "ring of sadness" around an Image of Boone's foot (which is also the shape of Kentucky).

Be sure to read the notes associated with each poem in the back. These not only present interesting facts, but some of Manning's own thoughts. Finally is an essay tracing English Romanticism through Wordsworth to D Boon .. Bear killer.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars black powder reading., June 11, 2007

By 

Ichabod Craig "squidly" (Pattaya Thailand) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: A Companion for Owls: Being the Commonplace Book of D. Boone, Long Hunter, Back Woodsman, & c. (Hardcover)

i am not a reader of poetry ...in general.... i stumbled across this at my local library and love it... i bought 4 copies from amazon and my friends are getting one.. gives you just a hint of the mind set of early frontier free thinking men (women)....