Please Stop Advise

Rusty Morrison's first collection, Whethering (2005), won the Colorado Prize for Poetry, and the manuscript for the true keeps calm biding its story won the Alice Fay di Castagnola Prize for a work in progress from the Poetry Society of America. It has since won the Sawtooth Poetry Prize for 2007, the Academy of American Poets 2008 James Laughlin Award, and the 2009 George Bogin Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. It is a notable second book.

Notable first in form. The work consists of nine sections of six poems each. Each of the poems has the same title: "please advise stop." Each is arranged in three stanzas of three lines each. Each unpunctuated, uncapitalized line ends with one of the three words in the title, and the last line of every poem ends in the words "please advise."

The poems' resemblance to telegrams lends their plea a kind of urgency they might not otherwise have. Each line is discrete, and frequently unconnected to the lines adjacent to it. One would think that such lines would function interchangeably, but the structure and the vision of the lines is so assured that one comes to completely trust their order and purpose. Also, the end words end nothing; in fact, they reach out to the reader (or is it the Reader?) for help at every turn. Even the lines that end in "stop" beg only for a pause, to think, to look into and behind the surface message to the emotional, intellectual, and spiritual quandary of the messenger.

Her father has died; he is "moving swiftly ahead of reason and outside word's reach please advise." Morrison is dealing with that loss, with its consequences, with the meaning of memory, perception, and reality: "each loss grows from a previously unremarkable vestigial organ stop / will I act now as if with a new limb stop / a phantom limb of the familial please advise." She is uncertain, stopped in her tracks, uncomfortable, but she does not seek comfort or mere comprehension: she says, "nothing that simply appeases will ever mean vision again to me please advice"; she says, "comprehension alone will not suffice stop." Instead, she takes the occasion of her father's death to explore the nature of existence, its contingency and tactile immediacy, its illusiveness and the need both to accept the illusion and believe in "actuality."

One of her primary tools for investigation is her senses: "skin of my fingertips pulling itself taut to receive sensation stop." Her images arrive fresh, like bulletins: "lizard fixed to a stone as if it were the stone's lung stop," or (almost at random) "the quiet presses like a palmful of gravel against my cheek stop."

Vivid as they are, these images are also suspect. Morrison is keenly aware of the fleetingness and deceptiveness of perception: "I mark my room with all five of my senses but soon it is strange again stop," she says, "the intoxicating smugness of a black felt hat's softness stop / pinholes pressed through paper fill immediately with shadow please advise." Indeed, like other postmodernists, she recognizes the human desire to cling, to latch onto objects, or perception, or memory, or consciousness itself, even by self-destructive means. She confesses, "guilt is still my first form of fastening please advise." The egocentricity, and, ultimately, the impossibility of "fastening," must be recognized. In an earlier poem ("Prologue"), she writes "what won't be seized / is presence." She calls her "desire for cohesion of ends to beginnings so guileful an enemy please advise." She wants to learn "how to narrate my lateral glance without fastening stop." She expresses her desire to detach with characteristic wit and feeling: "quail's call because to say lament would be thick with self-reference please."

In her grief, though, she mourns the lost stability of the world. She sees and hears and feels how things, including emotions, appear and disappear from consciousness and perception as they do in and from the actual world...