In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Impetuous Sleeper
  • Zachary Martin (bio)
Impetuous Sleeper Donald Morrill. Mid-List Press, 2009. 182 Pages, Paper, $16.00.

“The Invention of the Japanese Lantern,” the most striking and perhaps the most representative essay in Impetuous Sleeper, Donald Morrill’s new prose collection from Mid-List Press, finds the author literally descending into the earth on a group spelunking trip and emerging with a survey of language: “How many metaphors for our natures do we loot from nature, none of them, however seductive, accurate?” Throughout the book, in fact, Morrill mines the past two decades of his life to explore overlapping strata of dreams and memory that prefigure the future, reveal layers of language, and convey insight. What emerges in this marvelous book is a lyrical map of, in Morrill’s words, “our belief in memoir . . . the pathos of our time.”

Morrill alternately stretches his metaphors (the cave he explores is a “loamy sphincter”) and denies their efficacy in expressing human experience. He is “always at the cave mouth and yet nested in its depths with strangers,” pushing against walls “that test, that silence.” How does Morrill remedy this paradox? With more writing, of course. Despite his succinct, precise prose, this lends an air of hypergraphia to Impetuous Sleeper, of trying to write past the problem. This is one of the central conflicts in the collection, and it makes Morrill’s effort Sisyphean: bold, noble. He does not skirt the problems of language, and this makes the gems he holds up to the light shine more brightly.

An explication of the limitations of the experiences of reading and writing continues in “Kite Flying at Midnight,” a lyrical, fragmentary essay that could pass as a writer’s primer. “A poem,” Morrill says, “is greater than the sum of its parts, but it is not clear what all those parts might be, since a number of them are unidentified and live elsewhere than where discussions of grammar, [End Page 159] lineation, meter etymology, punctuation, and figuration, etc., might locate them.” Some aspects of literature, Morrill suggests, are buried “in the mood of the age” and can never be recovered; any contemporary understanding of poetics will inevitably have an air of archaeology about it. Even when observations like these feel reductive—poetic sensitivity, for instance, “produces a tedious attention to anything” in lesser writers—they have a ring of truth, with Morrill’s meditation usually deepening them further.

Some of the most interesting pieces in Impetuous Sleeper are those previously unpublished. Foremost among these are the “Saccades” chapters, which begin with a helpful definition:

sac·cade n. (1) A violent check the rider gives a horse by drawing both reins suddenly; (2) A strong pressure of the violin bow against the strings by which three or four notes are played at once; (3) The involuntary jerking movement in the act of swallowing; (4) The seemingly random scans the eye makes across an object; as in REM sleep; a rapid irregular movement of the eye as it changes focus moving from one point to another, for example, while reading.

The term, with its varied uses, is real; its appropriation as a description of written form, to my knowledge, is unique to Morrill. And he is right to distinguish his aphoristic style from predecessors: his saccades are Nietzsche without the egotism, Emerson without the didacticism, a poet’s Tractatus without the emphasis on logos. These saccades—there are three sections of them, spaced evenly throughout the book—are largely observational, diagnostic rather than prescriptive.

Even if the reasoning behind Morrill’s sequencing decisions in these sections is not always apparent, it is clear they are not arranged arbitrarily: like so much sediment, they build up a topology. The imagination draws its own conclusions, more unique and interesting than anything offered by simple logic. A picture begins to form of a writer preoccupied with foreshadowings and prognostications:

Regret promises an understanding of a future that never, finally, came to pass.   “He’s probably a waiter for life, but he doesn’t know it yet.”   All metaphysics in our time, and in the foreseeable future, will be in describing how the human does or does not...

pdf