Whethering

by Rusty Morrison

Winner of the 2004 Colorado Prize for Poetry
Published by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University

"In agile lines that canyon-open, exposing an unfashionable, edgy sinceritas, Rusty Morrison explores the intertwining of life and language in quiet, gorgeous meditations inflected by barn swallows. Whethering leads us into a shapely attentiveness to those particular others human, animal, vegetal that situate our affectual and perceptual experience and call us to find our 'way again and again/ outside the one thing.' With trenchant political and philosophical repercussions, Morrison's poems cut through the constraints of systematic thought to articulate gestural meanings, powerful rivulets of suggestion and sensibility that reopen the world and wound of being."
—Forrest Gander, author of Torn Awake and Science & Steepleflower

"What happens when the sensual world interacts with the word, when knowledge bows gratefully to perception, is Whethering. Such a brief, rare, unexpected music ensues: the artery / of a lark's cry."
—Gillian Conoley, author of Lovers in the Used World and Beckon

"Whethering demands that its reader wake into what are already only the traces of language­'s making. From its first page, this book variously implores and compels language to move from desire to the real, 'the hind leg of every thought / always crouched, / a leap / to outlast the visible / this stalking sky. This trying to fix / with intention' is a dangerous endeavor, but Morrison is alert, gutsy, and agile."
—Elizabeth Robinson, author of Apprehend and Pure Descent

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Patrick Duggan · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Liked not quite as much as The True Keeps Calm. But what a deft use of caesura, fragment, imagery.