The One Abiding, 2003
Story Line Press
96 pages; ISBN:1-58654-021-1

Available for purchase from Story Line Press.

Click here to read selections from this book.
Click here to read Dana Gioia's introduction to this book.


"A grief that shuns self-pity; vivid recollections that avoid sentimentality—such are the paradoxical achievements of Frederick Morgan's haunting new book . . . A wise and beautiful collection." —Rachel Hadas

"The new poems of Frederick Morgan are a celebration of life. Here are the men and women we have been. He brings us to a place where past and future no longer matter, 'nor even our own dear selves.' Rid of attachment we are free to love. The writing is a joy in itself—whether reflecting on experience or telling a story it has the sound of truth. Morgan is a master of the poetry of our time." —Louis Simpson

"The poems of childhood in the first of the book’s five sections cite real things and happenings to evoke common emotions and then evaluate them as cogently as any other searing and reflective mind might . . ." —Ray Olson

"The poems in this remarkable book are deeply haunted—by apast remembered or imagined; by terrors, hopes and dreams . . . Few poets (though of those few the best) have distilled as strange an elixir." —Anthony Hecht

"The One Abiding is a book fraught with thresholds, crossroads and partings. Its publication marks the beginning of Frederick Morgan's ninth decade. In these poems, the writer stands between two worlds—past and present, East and West, material and spiritual, verdant and fatal—often unable to reconcile them except in the living unity of his own existence, and the formal unity of his poems. Indeed, the poet's firm confrontation with what cannot ever be reconciled, called back, consoled, is just what gives this book its deep insight and mastery." —Emily Grosholz