Maurice Manning Knihy

From church barn to apple orchard, from snow-covered pasture to secret moonshine cabin, Manning's Snakedoctor reinvigorates the Kentucky pastoral through poems that find light in shadow, good in evil, love in a father's stinging blow. Maurice Manning returns to the Kentucky countryside in his eighth collection, Snakedoctor. Existing between haunting memory and pastoral dreamscape, this quiet collection showcases Manning's storytelling at its finest. Simple, four-beat lines hold epiphanies--"the barn is just an empty church"-- and announce visits from seven-foot strangers named Mr. True. Here, God is reimagined as a "serious banjo player" who calls the world to sing. And sing Manning does. Through rhyme, blues, and haiku, Snakedoctor trains our ears to hear music in the mundane, to find beauty all around us: in the annotated margins of a well-read book, the flight of a father's shadow puppet, the yellow centers of daisies. Punctuated by rain's pitter-patter on a tin wash tub, and the "ring of lonely" in a farmer's voice as he calls his cattle home, Snakedoctor is a collection that will leave you wanting to dog-ear its pages. From childhood to fatherhood, church barn to apple orchard, moonshine to moonbeam, we leave these poems understanding Manning's wish: "I wanted to make a prayer and I did, / in half-sleep after the dream."

The Blueshirts were a quasi-fascist organisation founded in 1932 following de Valera s first election victory. They adopted the style and some of the substance of European fascist movements. Although relatively short-lived, they were one of the founding strands in what became the Fine Gael party. Maurice Manning s definitive history chronicles the rise and fall of the Blueshirts against the social and political background of Ireland in the late 1920s and 1930s. In many ways this book is a model. [The author s] account is clear, detailed and fully documented, his analysis of the conflicting interests and emotions dispassionate and perceptive, his conclusions balanced and sound. This is the way Irish history should be written. The Irish Times An admirably lucid and well documented book [that] describes the rise and fall of the Blueshirt movement which figured so dramatically on the public stage during the turbulent thirties. Irish Independent Manning s book is a worthy and welcome addition to a small but growing body of serious work on personalities, issues and institutions in the modern Irish state. Journal of Modern History "