“Manning’s work is set apart by his belief in the narrative quality of the world—a belief manifested in poetry that conveys self-forgetful wonderment at nature, a sincere longing for transcendence, and a quiet hope that beauty will last... Decisions about the form and content of his poetry aren’t merely aesthetic—the aesthetic implies the ethical. When he flirts with and then rejects Wright’s free verse style, refusing ‘to leave the sense of meaning / behind,’ he’s ultimately rejecting the ethic of the unmediated self and clinging instead to his familial, cultural, and spiritual heritage. He’s embracing an ethic of citizenship.”
—Timothy Kleiser

"There’s something Taoist about Maurice Manning. Close your eyes and he’s wandering around the 6th Century BCE landlocked Henan province instead of the Twenty-first Century Kentucky countryside, philosophizing about love, time, art, remembering poignant folk stories about moonshiners, his father and grandfather, all in the context of lush and lonely rural Kentucky, musing, generally, about existence and how we fit in."
—Charles Rammelkamp