Common Man（ISBN=9780547249612）

　　The Common Man, Maurice Manning's fourth collection, is a series of ballad-like narratives, set down in loose, unrhymed iambic tetrameter, that honors the strange beauty of the landscape and the idiosyncratic adventures and personalities of the old-timers who were his neighbors, friends, and family of the Kentucky mountain country he knew as a child. Playing off the book's title, Manning demonstrates that no one is common or simple. Instead, he creates a detailed, complex, and poignant portrait--by turns serious and hilarious, philosophical and speculative, but ultimately tragic--of a fast-disappearing aspect of American culture. The Common Man's accessibility and its enthusiastic and sincere charms make it the perfect antidote to the glib ironies that characterize much contemporary American verse. It will also help to strengthen Manning's reputation as one of his generation's most important and original voices.

Moonshine
The Mute
A Bestiary
A Wavering Spindle of Forsythia
The Pupil
A Prayer to God My God in a Time of Desolation
Three Truths, One Story
Hey, Sidewinder
A Blasphemy
The Old Clodhopper's Aubade
Ars Poetica Shaggy and Brown
Emptying a Rain Gauge
Sowing Butter Beans with a Stick
Dead Tree, Two Crows, Morning Fog
Thunderbolt, My Foot
The Burthen of the Mysterv Indeed
A Panegyric Against the Consolation of Grief
A Wringer Washer on the Porch'
For the Last Time, No, I'm Not the Rabbit Man
That Durned Ole Via Negativa
The Lord He Thought He'd Make a Man
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