David Treadway Manning

(September 19, 1928 - November 24, 2021)

David Treadway Manning was a Pushcart nominee and three-time winner of the North Carolina Poetry Society’s Poet Laureate Award. His poems appeared in Southern Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, Rattle, 32 Poems, and also Literary Trails of Eastern North Carolina: A Guidebook, edited by Geogann Eubanks (UNC Press). He was a past winner of the Longleaf Chapbook competition and of Crucible’s Sam Ragan Award. He published ten chapbooks, most recently Singularities (Finishing Line Press, 2018). His full-length works included The Flower Sermon, runner-up for the 2007 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award: Soledad (Main Street Rag, 2014); and the unserious Yodeling Fungus (Old Mountain Press. 2010). His last collection of poetry, Sailing the Bright Stream: New & Selected Poems, won the 2021 Brockman-Campbell Award for Poetry. As the convenor of the Friday Noon Poets of Chapel Hill, he was coeditor of the group’s anthology, Always on Friday (Katherine James Books, 2006). David and his wife Doris lived in Cary, North Carolina.

sample poem

Carburetor Man

The Chevy coughed, sucked wind
& died as we rolled into Peters
Feed & Automotive, four miles south
of Clarkton, NC, Ball-Peen, the counter

man, said, “Sounds like the carb,
I’ll go fetch Slim.” They shoved tires
aside & raised the hood. Men ringed
the hanging 60-watt bulb to watch

The Carburetor Man. Slim laid white
stud-dealer’s hands on the greasy
steel throat, yelled, “Crank the sucker,”
& flapped in gas. Then he scooped

deep with a skinny tool for the uvula
(or whatever the hell is down there)
and tweaked some screws. From a Pepsi
bottle marked NITRO, Slim poured

down a chaser & goosed the jets. The Chevy
roared! Eighteen bucks for the ring-side
seat, but our tee-time had passed.
So we stayed the night for the tractor-pull.

Praise for Sailing the Bright Stream

David Manning’s new collection, Sailing the Bright Stream, is an immersion into shimmer and revelation, the lyric circumnavigation over not just water, but terra firma—the often intimidating, yet familiar and cherished, geography of the querulous heart, its rites and fractures, the gleam of language flowing from the poet’s pen. These are poems with heft and imagination, a sense of humor, and abiding faith. They lead us ever homeward—as Manning writes in his wonderful poem, “Perennial”—that we shall “awake / in that resounding dawn.”

—Joseph Bathanti, North Carolina Poet Laureate (2012-2014)

One word in particular describes the experience of hiking the landscapes of David Manning's poems: wonder. In these lines I encounter the novel, the exciting, the unexpected, the occasionally weird, all joining in perfect sense and sensitivity to become familiar. Affirming. On the final page, I say, “YES, this is the way it is.” The particulars, the universals, the challenge, the invitation to share our humanness in all its variety make this a wonderful collection, decades of favorites and new poems to anchor them.

—Bill Griffin, author of Riverstory : Treestory

While the physical landscape here extends from the beaches of southern California to the hills of West Virginia to the east coast, the emotional landscape is equally as broad and deep. There is a compassion in these poems that resonates, a sense of wonder as the poet looks inward and outward, often at the same time. There are poems that brought me to tears, others that had me laughing and nodding in agreement at the situations and emotions. Others lingered with me throughout the day. David Manning has captured intense moments with a kindness that is too often lacking in our twenty-first century world. Brava on a collection that will have many more people saying Yes to these poems.

—Pat Riviere-Seel, author of Nothing Below but Air