To Honor the Imagined Whole

Many of the poems in To Honor the Imagined Whole, a new collection of verse from Robert Morgan, are concerned with music. The longest, "The Oratorio That Was Time," celebrates the discovery by a youth that music surrounds us, not only in the call of a quail in fields and doves in morning fog, or in sounds of wind and thunder, music at church and on the radio, but in the late-night creak of a house, the distant bark of a dog, rippling water, the ache of silence, consciousness, and time itself. Other poems recall the notes of an ancestor's harmonica, a faraway cowbell, a mandolin played by an unpopular step-grandmother. Accompanying poems address subjects drawn from recent events, such as the sweet growing solipsism of pandemic lockdown, and the simultaneous sense of lateness and anticipation in our lives. In other poems, Morgan seeks to illustrate and understand discoveries of contemporary science, the surprising poetry of the everyday, and the way history impacts the present on the most unexpected occasions. Besides music, a leading theme of the book is the power of family stories. Morgan writes of how people long gone but vivid in memory, through bonds of kinship—sometimes painful, often liberating—create a sense of community and recognition across time.