The True Keeps Calm Biding Its Story - Softcover

Morrison, Rusty

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0916272982 ISBN 13: 9780916272982

Publisher: Ahsahta Press, 2008

Synopsis

Poetry. Winner of the 2008 James Laughlin Award. 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.

About this title

About the Author

Rusty Morrison's first poetry collection, Whethering, won the Colorado Prize for Poetry (Center for Literary Publishing 2004), selected by Forrest Gander. She has been a recipient of the Cecil Hemley (2006), and Robert H. Winner (2003) Memorial Awards from The Poetry Society of America, which also awarded the true keeps calm biding its story the Alice Fay di Castagnola Prize for a manuscript in progress.

Reviews

Starred Review. 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. (Jan.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Ahsahta Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0916272982
• ISBN 13: 9780916272982
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 88