Broadstone Books is pleased to offer this landmark poem by one of America's most celebrated contemporary Appalachian authors for the first time in an edition of its own. In this poem of the "southern night" Morgan is lulled by the call of the mockingbird, "a voice that raises the hackles on mountains and chills the barometric spine," into wide-ranging reflections and speculations, a philosophical journey on which the reader can only latch hold tightly and marvel at the twists and turns his thinking takes. What inlesser hands might have been chaotic is here exhilarating and inspiring, guiding us until we arrive together at a point where, as in "an opening in the canopy" of Morgan's beloved Appalachian forests, "light shines from obscure places." "Mockingbird" is a poem of incantatory power.