Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions (Yale Series of Younger Poets) [Hardcover]

Mr. Maurice Manning (Author)

Book Description

Series: Yale Series of Younger Poets | Publication Date: August 2001

This year's winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Maurice Manning's Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions. These compelling poems take us on a wild ride through the life of a man-child in the rural South. Presenting a cast of allegorical, yet very real, characters, the poems have "authority, daring, and a language of colour and sure movement", says series judge W.S. Merwin. Maurice Manning is a native of Danville, Kentucky. He holds degrees from Earlham College, the University of Kentucky, and the University of Alabama, where he received his MFA in 1999. He has held a writing fellowship to The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He currently teaches English at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. From Seven Chimeras The way Booth makes a love story: same as a regular story, except under one rock is a trapdoor that leads to a room full of belly buttons; each must be pushed, one is a landmine. The way Booth makes hope: thirty-seven acres, Black Damon, Red Dog. Construct a pillar of fire in the Great Field and let it become unquenchable. The way Booth ends the Jack-in-the-Box charade: shoot the weasel in the neck and toss it to the buzzards. The way Booth thinks of salvation: God holding a broken abacus, coloured beads falling away.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Lawrence Booth is a vigorous, trash-talking, frustrating and entirely made-up young man from a rural South that's equal parts carnivorous nightmare, Freudian pastoral and deep-fried family romance. Manning, who hails from Kentucky, becomes the latest in the venerable Yale Younger Poets series (now judged by W.S. Merwin) with these sometimes over-the-top, often surprisingly difficult poems about Lawrence's boyhood and youth in a "sweet tobacco, cornmeal, archetypal world." Sonnets, catalogues, shaped poems and non sequitur-filled rambles consider Booth's "gradeschool days," his vivid nights, his television-viewing habits, his explorations on foot, his difficult sister and his comic attacks on his region's heritage. Manning also depicts Lawrence's companions the vicious, overwhelming father Mad Daddy; Red Dog, a faithful dog; Missionary Woman, a love interest; God; the devil; and Black Damon, a young African-American who speaks seven of his own poems (called "Dreadful Chapter One," "Dreadful Chapter Two," and so on) in a deliberately outrageous minstrel dialect ("Red Dog barkie echo plum back to the house"). Manning's mesh of voices, fears and incidents (not to mention his blackface moments) recalls John Berryman's Dream Songs, and Merwin notes the similarities in a perceptive foreword. Yet Manning's adventurously uneven verses bring him close to ambitious Southerners, from Robert Penn Warren to Frank Stanford; his often antirealist forms seek to capture a South many people will find incredible. (Aug.)Forecast: Merwin's third pick for Yale since becoming its judge is also his second Southern-set, book-length sequence in a row, following last year's Ultima Thule by Davis McCombs. Yale's prestigious first-book series reached its peak in the '50s, when then-judge W.H. Auden picked (among others) Ashbery, Hollander, Rich and Merwin himself. But with the right regional and national publicity, this uneven volume could do well.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Review

"Manning displays not just terrific cunning but terrific aim-he nails [his] images." -- Dwight Garner, New York Times Book Review

"[Manning's] antirealist forms seek to capture a South many people will find incredible." -- Publishers Weekly

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 96 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (August 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300089961
• ISBN-13: 978-0300089967
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 6.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,831,761 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

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Brillaint Collection of Visions, March 29, 2002

By 

Sehar Tariq (CT, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions (Yale Series of Younger Poets) (Paperback)

Compelling and captivating, this book kept me engrossed from cover to cover. The book keeps you guessing from beginning to end and hence engages the reader at all times. In the book, Maurice Manning gives us glimpses from the life of Lawrence Booth but holds back the entire picture and it is like a jigsaw puzzle with some pieces missing and hence the reader, trying to see the complete picture, is constantly guessing.
That is not the only charm that the book has. What is fascinating is that it is an adult painting a vision of the world through the eyes of a child and not just any child but the strange Lawrence Booth; a child with a fascinating and vivid imagination and a vision of the world that is colored by his troubled home life. A window in to the hopes, dreams and experiences of Lawrence, one cannot help but fall in love with this strange, distressed boy. Your heart goes out to this boy who has been robbed of a childhood due to his difficult family circumstances.
If it seems that the book is a collection of melodramatic and melancholic poems, it is certainly not true. For what stands out most in all these poems is the courage and spunk of Lawrence Booth. His indomitable spirit shines through each poem bringing forth a sense of self-deprecating humor despite his hard family life for he is "The boy with the brains God gave a goose. The boy who took thirteen rabies shots in the belly." This removes any possible air of depression from the book in fact the straight, matter of fact and brutally honest narration gives the book a humorous quality. The language used is honest and in the poems called "Dreadful chapters" it is written as it is spoken. His ability to capture in words not only the accent but also the true feelings and emotions make this book fascinating to read.
There is a wide variety of poems in this short collection for poems like "Shady Grove" will make you think of profound questions, the "Dreadful Chapters" might make you cringe with their language or disturbing scenarios, "Prisoner of Conscience" and "Seventeen" will make you laugh out loud at their blunt sincerity while poems such as "Beck" and "Complain" will astound you with their unconventional formats. Hence, even though the central characters remain the same, each poem offers something new and keeps the reader guessing where it fits in, into the greater picture of Lawrence Booth's life.
During the course of the book it is impossible to dissociate the voice of Manning from that of Booth, which is evidence of the success of the poetry, by the end you are immersed in Booth's friendship with Black Damon, his attachment to Red Dog and his love for the mysterious, Missionary Woman. this book is fascinating and interesting to read. Although some of the images and ideas are violent are disturbing they are thought provoking and sincere. And like any good book of poetry this book will leave you crying and laughing and most important of all, wanting you to come back to it again.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fictional Characters, Refreshing Poetry filled with Emotion, March 29, 2002

By 

Allie (New Haven, CT) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions (Yale Series of Younger Poets) (Paperback)

Maurice Manning's first collection of poetry is, in a word, refreshing. Unlike the work of many contemporary poets, Manning's poems are not thinly veiled considerations of his own experience but investigations into the lives of a set of fictional characters. Similar to a novel in many ways, Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions follows Law Booth from his troubled childhood in 1970's rural Kentucky into his adult years as an eccentric recluse. The chronology of his life, however, is by no means clear. Pinnacle events and characters reappear throughout the poem sequence, allowing past and present to coexist in a way that attempts to reproduce the protagonist's movement into madness. Because this is a "Book of Visions," some of the episodes depicted here must be figments of Booth's imagination. The blurred distinction between these and the events that `actually' occurred is also meant to illustrate the central character's approaching insanity.
These many uncertainties make Lawrence Booth a book the reader must work to understand. Enough questions remain after finishing the final poem to encourage the reader to begin the collection again, but not so many to frustrate the attempt. Publisher's Weekly called these poems "surprisingly difficult" and they are, but not in the same way that much contemporary poetry is. Many potential readers are scared off by poetry whose meaning must be sought through veils of confusing images. Manning's poems are "difficult" because the chronology and the truth of the underlying story are obscured. The best way to read this book, then, is to approach it as one might a contemporary novel whose plot is revealed only through the flashbacks of characters with differing perspectives. The challenge of such a project is what makes it interesting. Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions is to some extent unsolvable, however, just one more quality that makes it refreshing when compared to its peers.
Manning's poems are more than just challenging and interesting, though, and they do more than simply follow a set of characters as a prose story might. Their content is gutsy and emotional, especially in the "Dreadful Chapters" that are spoken in a backwoods dialect that reflects the coarseness of the boy's abusive, alcoholic father who, after shooting his dog, "smak[s] lil Law in he sassy head an say, / Next time, Red Doggie gonna lie like a rug / all still, I kill him deader an four o'clock." Other poems are poignant and moving, as in "Calumet" where Law's boyhood friend Black Damon comforts him with the gift of "an amber flint," saying, "pretend it stops / your chest from feeling shattered." Still others are humourous, as "Envoy" in which Booth "Would like to find sober woman (beer okay) / interested in pick-up trucks, old-time / Gospel music, buffalo trails."
This last poem reads like a list of possible personal ads for the main character. Like other poems in the collection, it places poetry in the context of a different genre of writing. "Proof," for example, is set up like a geometric proof, complete with hand-drawn diagram, "Complaint" appears to be the document from a civil case in which Lawrence Booth is the defendant and "Progress Report" is a letter sent from Law's elementary school teacher to his parents, lamenting his misbehavior in school. These mock documents, poetic constructions of mundane writing, are funny and fresh and provide additional evidence about Booth's life through several new voices.
Manning's ability to write through many voices makes his characters complex and continually interesting. Through Booth and his companions, Manning will inspire the full spectrum of emotion in the reader as well as providing a challenging narrative maze to work through.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Intense, March 31, 2002

By 

theninjabandit "theninjabandit" (CT, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions (Yale Series of Younger Poets) (Paperback)

Once again the Yale Series of Younger Poets has brought a wonderful collection to print. Maurice Manning's "Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions" is a deeply intense book of poems that is likely to affect every reader that comes across it. At times frightening, the poems are about the world of a boy named Lawrence Booth, or Law, at different points during his childhood and adolescence. The characters and events are recounted in a wonderfully vivid manner, but much of the time you are left wondering what is really is occurring in Law's life, and what is just a "vision."
The most remarkable aspect of this book is the use of voice. Different poems are written in different ways, which contributes to the animated nature of the book. At one end of the spectrum are the "Dreadful Chapters" which are written in a backwoods voice that, on the page, may look confusing because of spelling, but when read aloud are amazingly real and powerful: "An why come Law git stuck wit such a name / dat he alway cipher wrong from right-- / so much he git a tooth-clench mood to fight?" (from "Dreadful Chapter Two). At the opposite end is a more elegant voice that uses beautiful metaphors: "Sheepish as a far off echo, Lawrence Booth wades / into the Great Fields and the wide-yawning night" (from "Bellwether"). And, of course, there are countless voices to be found in this collection that lie somewhere in between these two extremes.
One thing must be noted is that this collection is difficult to understand. The poems are not in chronological order, and are sometimes missing some information that is given in another poem later or earlier in the book. Furthermore, some poems are "unconventional." One is in the form of a geometry proof, and another is a complaint form. Personally, though, I think that the search for answers in this book is a big part of the joy in reading it. Piecing together information, finding links between poems because of a certain voice, phrase, or word used, and concentrating on the imagery and form was a pleasure to do, and it really added to the experience of the book. I feel that the ambiguity within the pages helps to suggest the uncertainty in Law's life.
I have rated Manning's book at five out of five stars. It was undoubtedly the best book of poetry I have come across this year, and I am sure he will be bringing us more in the future.