the true keeps calm biding its story

Rusty Morrison

Selected for the 2007 Sawtooth Poetry Prize by Peter Gizzi

In the aftermath of her father’s death, the speaker of Rusty Morrison’s exquisitely formed poems takes a step-by-step accounting of her transformation as she reconciles herself to loss. This book-length sequence is the silvery underside of elegy, a lyric of living acceptance paced with “the linen texture of right silences.”

“Rusty Morrison’s the true keeps calm biding its story brilliantly restores the energy of telegraphic communication, launching line after line toward a potentially infinite horizon of meaning. Her careful handling of form allows knowing to remain both openly discrete and discretely open. This is a joyous read and a remarkable book.” —Peter Gizzi, judge of the 2007 Sawtooth Poetry Prize

“The contemplative visionary quietism of Rusty Morrison’s work recalls the graph paintings of Agnes Martin while remaining absolutely original. Reading meditative and tremulous lines in the manuscript such as:

nearness is funnel into which I keep pouring us stop
each vow of truthfulness is darkly overhung with a rampart of prophesy stop
the visible is overtaking and undertaking me at the same time please

I think of how perfectly they answer to William James’ description of our consciousness in the ‘different pace of its parts. Like a bird’s life . . . made of an alteration of flights and perchings.’” —Susan Howe