The True Keeps Calm Biding Its Story: (Sawtooth Poetry Prize Series Modern and Contemporary Poetry)

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.

Review :
"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 (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.) --Publishers Weekly ??"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 ??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 ??"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 ??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