the true keeps calm biding its story

Rusty Morrison

Selected for the 2007 Sawtooth Poetry Prize by Peter Gizzi

Winner of the 2008 James Laughlin Award

 

“In the nine groups of six poems, all titled ‘please advise stop,’ that form Morrison’s remarkable Sawtooth Poetry Prize–winning second volume, the now-archaic yet ever-mechanical language of the telegram is used to plumb the vicissitudes of grief and grapple with the death of the speaker’s father. Each line of these unpunctuated, nine-line poems ends with ‘stop,’ ‘please’ or ‘please advise,’ appealing to some ghostly reader for assistance. The rhythm and torque Morrison (Whethering) creates is exquisite and evocative. Often dark and aphoristic, these lines shift between momentary observation (‘the water puddle sways like an earthbound kite stop’), pained seeking (‘night might still be floating somewhere above us its blood supple and aromatic stop’) and near action, perhaps in the hope of relief (‘I stare until I consider the scene truly acknowledged stop’); always, anguish is an instrument for change. Most haunting are the poems’ final, pleading words: ‘into the dark trees invite the darker birds please advise.’ Morrison’s vamp on grief not only draws readers’ attention to the tenuous capacity of language to manage loss, but also leaves the reader moved by what comes to feel like an intensely intimate work.” —Publishers Weekly [starred review]

 

“For Morrison, meaning is brief; it exhibits a momentary opening—everything might rush in and join with everything else in single meaning, or else it might disperse:

there are thoughts he must have entered though they were only half-open stop (39)

Each line needs to come on the heels of another line, to prop it up and to make it disappear. They need to ‘stop’ and they need to be interrupted, but they also need to rush forward into the next line without delay:

how to tell what must be kept and what must be kept provisional please advise (53)

This necessity both builds and tears down meaning, but that is not as important as the poem’s anxiety over the terminal nature of the poetic line:

a silence from which I am excluded can teach me only exclusion’s precision stop (54)

. . . In writing this review, I have two hopes. One, to approach an apprehension of the motion Morrison produces; two, to recommend the true keeps calm biding its story to anyone and everyone concerned or even slightly interested in what is happening with the line.” —from the review by Thomas Cook in Luna

 

“Morrison’s poetry is demanding to the degree that it feels ephemeral and crucial; to the degree that it feels simultaneously saturating and austere. These poems cull a rhetoric all their own, and do not traffic in metaphor so much as enact the metaphorical in duress: the indefatigable enterprise of bearing and bearing across, slowed to the uncanny largo of a Bill Viola, and at the same time as disstyingly incessant as the stream of a Jenny Holzer. This is poetry and likewise poetry as medium for some fantastic investigation of communication in excess of even poetry’s own generous parameters.”—from the review by Michael Snediker in Pleiades

 

“‘[F]irst I will need to write any of the letters neither of us wrote to the other,’ she says halfway through the book. Instead of writing letters, of course, Morrison is writing poems. Each one feels like a brittle piece of something broken. Yet Morrison’s writing is hardly brittle. She captures the ordinary and pounds it into phrases that are immediately powerful and familiar. ‘[S]ky speaks with an accent like worship,’ she writes. She also writes of ‘lizard fixed to a stone as if it were the stone’s lung.’ Elsewhere, she says, ‘the petals of poppies orange the eye with after-color.’ Morrison’s strong, subtle phrases wait in each poem to ‘orange’ the mind’s eye of the reader. Equally powerful are the rhythm and symmetry Morrison builds into her poem sequence, which she separates into nine sections. Each page features a poem consisting of three stanzas with three lines each. But the poems are not titled, so they may just as easily be read as a single long poem—with nine poems total—or they may be read as fifty-four individual poems. The variations create different resonances to the poetry. Each line of the poem ends with either ‘please,’ ‘advise,’ or ‘stop.’ She uses each word to create different effects. For instance, at times, ‘stop’ is used in place of a period, achieving the same simple effect. But at other times, a well-placed ‘stop’ gives a poem the uneasy feeling of a telegram bearing unfortunate news. Other times, ‘stop’ just gets in the way. At its best, ‘stop’ does several wonderful things at once: ‘any object inclines away from memory the more energetically I imagine its features stop’”—from the review by Chris Mackowski on The Hipster Book Club