After Urgency (Small Press Distribution (All Titles))
"The question underlyingAfter Urgency's pages is how to go on -- a question that presses even when we can do nothing else -- and each poem posits its own hard-wrestled, multiplying answer of gorgeous continuance. Rusty Morrison instantiates idea and feeling in ways unlike any other poet now writing. The intelligence and aliveness here are omnidirectional." --Jane Hirshfield, final judge for The Dorset Prize"After Urgencyis a wonder of nuanced meditations. . . . Nearly numb as they descend one by one down the ladder of the page into an abyss of silence, the lines are nonetheless continuously arresting in their delicate analyses of grief, its inflections and inexhaustible dimensions, its scald and duration, the way it triggers and owns perceptions. . . . If there is a phenomenology of grief, Morrison is its furthest explorer. . . ." --Cal Bedient"What contract does lyric language make with the world? From out of this series of elegies for her parents, Rusty Morrison derives the contract's first tenet: 'Essential in the verbal performance of any statement/is its mortality.' From the poet's poignant reckoning with her own concomitant mortality a Keatsian full-throatedness emerges, but what makes Morrison a post-modern is the way she pairs lyric's mimesis of interiority with philosophy's relentless self-scrutiny, 'demand[ing] of composition that its contrivance come apart.' The resulting poems revise the basic terms of mourning and the generic tropes of elegy. 'Notdeathas the word it was,' she writes, 'but an opening where the whole history of ideas might pass through, undetected.' This openness to ideas underwrites Morrison's refusal to be satisfied with metaphor, simile, and personification, fundamental tools of the Romantic lyric. 'Is the visible all reproduction?' she asks, and, in the wake of this question, cites figuration's failure to render visible anything more than the poet's own fancy: 'Visiting again the hawthorn, which I will not/embed with the more vivid, the charmed life,' she writes ruefully, 'this will be my model for every pact/I make with emptiness.' 'Released from the guilt of order and arrangement,'After Urgencytransforms the private ritual of mourning into its own form of ethics, a practice as old as Antigone, and as tragic." --Brian Teare--Advance Praise