Skip to content
FREE SHIPPING ON ALL DOMESTIC ORDERS $35+
FREE SHIPPING ON ALL US ORDERS $35+
Snakedoctor - Paperback | Diverse Reads

Snakedoctor

Availability:
in stock, ready to be shipped
Save 0% Save 0%
$18.00
$18.00 - $18.00
$18.00
$17.99
$17.99 - $17.99
$17.99
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.”

ISBN-13: 9781556596988

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press

Publication Date: 11-14-2023

Pages: 128

Product Dimensions: 8.90h x 5.80w x 0.50d

Maurice Manning is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently Railsplitter (2019) and Snakedoctor (2023). Manning has held fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers in Scotland. A former Guggenheim fellow, Manning teaches at Transylvania Universityin Lexington, Kentucky and for the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. His poems and essays have appeared in TIME, The Sewanee Review, and The New Yorker. He lives in Kentucky with his family.

Read an Excerpt

from Snakedoctor


Remember those paintings that show 

the immaculate heart of Mary, Marvella?

Her heart is floating in the air

with religious doo-dads all around it?

That’s what this shadow made me think of.


I’ve called this poem, Snakedoctor,

because I found a dragonfly

elegantly dead on the steps

of a church I was about to enter,

and remembered snakedoctor was

the equally poetic word

some country people used to use

to name this mesmerizing bug.

Unmoving now, it resembles a cross,

an awkwardly disfigured cross


I’m sorry, Marvella, if you think

I’m going to throw some mystical water

on all of this.  It isn’t mine

to throw, so you can put away

that practical umbrella now.

I wanted to make a prayer and I did,

in half-sleep after the dream,

not for an answer but a question.

The only way I have to reach you,

Marvella Hall, is through a poem.

I wanted you to know that you are loved,

you are loved, you are loved, you horsy old woman.

Two Shadows


The little one belongs to her

and the taller one is mine, though I doubt 

she knows the shadows walking hand

in hand ahead of us in the field

are ours.  If I walk behind her mine, 

without a word, overshadows

all of hers, a magic I think she likes. 

And when I walk at her side again,

the two of us return, a giant

and his long-legged little helper,

who’s new enough to walking still

she manages a wobble or swings

a foot in picking the place to put it. 

None of this beautiful, secret love

will last.  Other shadows will come 

along, and she’ll see her own one day 

apart from mine.  But before those fates 

arrive, I’m going to stretch my arms,

and tipping and twirling, I’ll show her how 

to turn her shadow into a bird

and rest it softly in the tree,

and afterward, when she sees a shadow, 

perhaps she’ll think of birds or me.