The True Keeps Calm Biding Its Story

by Morrison, Rusty

• ISBN13: 9780916272982
• ISBN10: 0916272982
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-01-01
• Publisher: Small Pr Distribution

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Pale fingers	p. 3
Sky speaks	p. 4
My pleasures inventoried	p. 5
The hill's grasses	p. 6
A breeze	p. 7
Walked barefoot	p. 8
I was dragging a ladder	p. 11
Only gray rocks with drifting mist	p. 12
Basin of hills	p. 13
The chainlink	p. 14
Like water spiders	p. 15
Any object inclines away	p. 16
With practice	p. 19
Just lean against the wallpaper	p. 20
Nearness is	p. 21
The vertebrae achieved	p. 22
My stammering mind	p. 23
Shaded but not rested	p. 24
Just long enough	p. 27
Here again is the counting of linoleum	p. 28
Breadcrumbs	p. 29
A pleasure to rub	p. 30
My new skin	p. 31
I saw the window	p. 32
I might travel his death	p. 35
My father's dying makes stairs	p. 36
There are no words	p. 37
Here I place	p. 38
There are thoughts	p. 39
Sieved the stillness	p. 40
The driver wasn't	p. 43
A gnat	p. 44
I add brush-strokes	p. 45
Though my first foray	p. 46
It was once believed	p. 47
The sun setting	p. 48
An aimlessness	p. 51
Attempting again proximity	p. 52
There was no moment	p. 53
Silently my father's dying	p. 54
Wind is	p. 55
The petals of poppies	p. 56
Sullenly disposed	p. 59
The coat-rack's narrow	p. 60
Tasted a weedy	p. 61
The rustle of a Sunday bundle	p. 62
Fill a page	p. 63
To set the table as if	p. 64
I throw a stone into air	p. 67
Not simply to lie on grass	p. 68
Elaborately frilled edge	p. 69
How to hold what remains	p. 70
For months after his death	p. 71
Today a ringing-in-the-ears	p. 72
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