Reviewed by Jon Michael Miller for Readers' Favorite

An Ancient Child Singing: A Celebration of Verse by Dwight David Morgan is a delightful, sometimes puzzling, and occasionally intentionally frivolous collection of poems divided into six sections: Passion, Sonnets, Pain, Being, Beasts and Birds, Family, and Shorts. In all, the collection contains 171 pieces, all but three of them on a single page, many only two or three lines, and almost all rhymed and metered. Some are mere clever quips, others provide food for thought, and several are outright conundrums. There are parodies, parables, pithy brain-teasers, analogies, riddles, and a vast array of sensory images. Morgan deals with themes including love, romance, money, man vs. nature, city vs. countryside, domesticity, betrayal, aging, religion, loss, and more. The poet’s mind seems ever-engaged with his daily life, writing some poems as messages to specific persons—a lover, wife, child, mother, father, neighbor, reader. Other poems are philosophic quips for the reader to ponder.

As someone who finds poetry the highest form of writing, where every word, every line-ending, every image counts, I was engaged in each of these poems, and particularly impressed by the range of imagery, much of which one seldom finds in verse: peanuts, peeling chrome, untouched snow, railroad tracks, even a rest room wall, to name a few. I was especially impressed with his skill as a sonneteer with the strict iambic pentameter and rhyme scheme of the form. For me, Edna St. Vincent Millay came to mind, as well as the distant voices of Emily Dickenson, Dylan Thomas, Ogden Nash, and William Carlos Williams in their directness and connection with ordinary life. It’s hard to decide on my favorite of the collection, but I think it comes down to a toss-up between “If Cindy Knew About Kathy” and “Rest Room Wall,” both of which made me howl out loud and read them to my wife. If you are a lover of excellent verse, make sure to pick up Dwight David Morgan’s An Ancient Child Singing.