Rusty Morrison

I found this alternately great and disappointing. The language and juxtaposition of images is GREAT. The subject matter is the speaker's grief over her father's death, which I didn't have enough patience for. Her pov is detached, dissociated, depresses, and more or less completely unable to deal with his loss, so *everything* becomes an aphorism to be telegraphed back to society/reality, of which the speaker has no part because she's isolated herself so completely. She's essentially catatonic. All she does is observe and refuse to feel and sleep.

But again, Morrison's language is gorgeous, clever, and quotable. I'd rate this book a 5 on its ability to make me read and reread lines for their imagery, music, and impact. But.

I've dealt with grief enough that I kind of want to slap the speaker until she lets the tears out and can tell the stories about her father that she considers to be only something to throw away.

Which, well, for a book of poetry, is arguably a success? She's getting an emotional response from me, even if it isn't what she may have hoped for.

I'd rather read Donald Hall's Without, which is his collection about his wife Jane Kenyon's slow death from cancer and his life in the aftermath of her death. It is gut-wrenching and devastating and guaranteed to make you cry, but it's also a catharsis from which Rusty Morrison flees far, far into the opposite direction.… (more)

Rusty Morrison uses form to affect breath, and breath to accent even the simplest of words into space and gravity. That isn't to say her words are simple--quite the opposite. Morrison is playing a game of language, using internal and slant rhyme so subtly as to draw attention to and from a point on a line, becoming speech, becoming a distillation of human conversation.
Morrison moves from image to Imagism, , sparsity to Oppen, simile to the audacity of Frazier and Stein. Her poems are elegant without elegance, and densely layered--there is an intelligent design at work here, to borrow the parlance of our times.

Morrison intermingles weather and certainty, showing us how both can change in a matter of moments. The body in her poetry is assembled from pieces, each excerpt becoming sign and symbol for something more. She moves fluidly through forms, scattering words on a page like fireworks to slow the readers attention, then moving o prose blocks, condensing the language to emphasize the narrative and emotion. Often in her poetry she staggers our perception, emotionalizing the dry and factual, while analytically approaching the emotional self. Whethering is all the accompaniment of a storm front.… (more)