Bucolics

Bucolics is a collection of poetry by the American poet Maurice Manning, published in 2008, containing seventy short poems. Its most striking formal feature is that none of the poems has a title and none uses punctuation; the lines flow naturally from image to image, as if pouring in gusts from one page to the next. The speaker addresses a figure called "Boss" directly and repeatedly in the tone of a farmer speaking to a hired hand—both the owner of the farm and, faintly, the mysterious power that created all things. Through this plain, rustic address the poet blends awe with intimacy, talking of branches, raindrops, the shadow of a hawk, the hop of a vulture, and other everyday things of the countryside, seeking traces of the divine in the details of dew and black branches. The tone of the book is at once meditative and humorous, with the solemnity of prayer and the ease of chatter along a field ridge; it is Manning's concentrated inquiry into nature, gratitude, faith, and the mystery of creation in his writing set in the Kentucky countryside, and is regarded as one of his most distinctive works.