Red Dirt Jesus
A unique American voice enters poetry here, emerging from monkey grass and moon, from the ditch between father (or Father) and son (or Son). It is crisp, laconic, parodic, mysterious. It blesses the diesel and the mud-flap sinner. Maybe it is Tom Sawyer's dark sexy side. Speaking of the cycles of life and death, it says "Before the end,/ everything is fiction." It says, "Buzzards gotta eat too,/ same as a worm." And it also promises that "everything unwilling/ to change will die, everything/ that changes dies only a little." -- Alicia Ostriker
Here is, in the poetry of Ray McManus, an unabashed sense of place, a fully realized belief in the poetic possibilities in the rural South Carolina landscape which, in his hands, eschews the cliché of country quaintness, for a twenty-first century toughness of existence--declining farms, disillusionment, and spiritual disquiet. Yet, curiously, McManus' vision is tempered by his complete belief in the healing of poetry, the grace of language and the manner in which this art can achieve a sublime transformation of the human experience. These are, simply put, striking poems of formal accomplishment and affirming musicality. -- Kwame Dawes
Ray McManus is a son of the red clay country and he gives us that country vividly with all its hard work, pain, loss, and sharp-edged humor. These are truth-telling poems that remind us to pay attention: "to the crow on the fencepost. the fly on the ceiling; to sit on a porch and talk to the dead in private...to lick the sky that falls on your lip..." Like the sons who learn to "hold their scythes steady," Ray McManus observes the world with a steady eye. -- Ellen Bass
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