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"My father's
dying offered an indelicate washing of my perception," says
the narrator in Rusty Morrison's newest work of poetry, The
True Keeps Calm Biding Its Story.
To compensate
for that "indelicate" shake-up, Morrison imposes a rigid rhythm
on the grieving process through the very structure of her
poems. She also speaks with clear, concise obtuseness.
If none
of that make sense…well, neither does death. The best anyone
can do is just try to work through it, and Morrison's combination
of contradictions proves to be a compelling attempt.
"[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"
Most
significantly, each poem ends with the phrase "please advise."
Morrison's narrator is seeking, searching, at times even yearning
for not only answers but understanding.
It is
hard to look past the please/advise/stop lines as anything
more than a modern poetry gimmick taken too far. They do,
however, imbue the poems with a cumulative rhythm that works
surprisingly well with the three-stanza, nine-line rhythm
of the individual poems. The overall effect is a stop-and-go
that always moves forward, a reflection of the uneasy and
vulnerable—and, for the reader, ultimately fulfilling—emotional
quest carried out over the course of the entire sequence.
If each poem feels like the brittle piece of something broken,
Morrison's overall structure pulls all the pieces together
into something strong and new and beautiful—and true.
Although
a work of modern poetry, The True Keeps Calm Biding Its
Story is very much a story. Truth awaits within, biding
its time. Please advise.
(May,
2008)
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