Idiolexicon

Whethering -- Poems by Rusty Morrison

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.

Labels: Recommended Reading