Donald Morrill
Donald Morrill is the author of three volumes of poetry as well as four books of nonfiction. He has taught at Jilin University, Peoples' Republic of China, and has been a Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Lodz, Poland, as well as the Bedell Visiting Writer in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa and the Tammis Day Writer-in-residence at the Poetry Center at Smith. Currently he teaches in the Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program at the University of Tampa and is Associate Dean of Graduate and Continuing Studies there. He is married to the writer Lisa Birnbaum.
AWAITING YOUR IMPOSSIBILITIES
BY DONALD MORRILL
$20.00
VAN K. BROCK FLORIDA POETRY SERIES (2015)
"I have a world not mine to stay," Donald Morrill writes in "The Intimate," a poem that recognizes like all the poems of Awaiting Your Impossibilities that "time is the form no thing abandons." Deeply considerate of the evanescence of our lives and the slippages of language, but dedicated likewise to the conviction that "one has to imagine each thing like a kiss," Morrill's most recent book of poems is equally sensuous and philosophical, bodily and ethereal, elemental and fleet in its artistry. It is a feast to follow these evocations and beholdings, their clarity and sweep, where even grit on a ripening orange comes to resemble "the night side of planets." How rare it is to find so sure and accomplished a meditative eye. -- Daniel Tobin, author of The Net and Belated Heavens
In his third collection of poetry, Awaiting Your Impossibilities, Donald Morrill recognizes the poet's desire to speak truth, and the reader's hope, albeit unmentionable, to take truth away from a poem. He recognizes it, but he doesn't yield to it. The speaker here seeks and fails at epiphany -- axiomatically, intimately, or both -- in effect, he tries on knowing like a cloak, while paradoxically, he writes poems whose primary gesture is to strip the mind bare. Awaiting Your Impossibilities is what the spirit would speak if it could talk directly -- not as "all thought knocked down to self hatred or self love" but in that uncertain place beyond dichotomies. Morrill may say "there are no years in praise," but there is a strong sense of time and tide in this praiseworthy collection. -- Jenny Factor, author of Unraveling at the Name
"Whose near miss are you?" asks an early poem in Donald Morrill's Awaiting Your Impossibilities -- a book brimming with questions, postulations, and assertions that are equally as haunting. Triggered by something as small as a twig or as big as a bolt out of the ether, Morrill's probing lyrics approach what matters -- death, love, how to live -- from startling angles: "Whose memory can we invade, should we really end?" and "Everything is escaping you -- that, too, is happiness." Formally inventive, purposeful yet disparate, both musing and muscled, these poems call me back and back. -- Ellen Doré Watson, author of Dogged Hearts
WITH YOUR BACK TO THE HALF DAY
BY DON MORRILL
$12.00. (email us for availability)
Van K. Brock Florida Poetry Series (2005)
With high lyric gifts in his back pocket, Morrill stands on the shore and throws question after question into the sea of contradiction that is our contemporary reality. In addresses to friends, to the reader, to the beloved, to the poet in us all, he questions our common mortality, ubiquitous and necessary evils, and his great luck in love. For his is, at heart, a lover's sensibility, and with an extraordinarily gentle touch, he probes this most common ground of poetry. -- Sidney Wade, author of Celestial Bodies
Most of the time, as Donald Morrill puts it, "the moment arrives like a hundred dull cousins." Luckily, it is precisely the deadening rubble which his poetry prods into a skeptical yet wholehearted pursuit of the numinous. When he finds it, we know it by the lush sounds and images marshaled to convey it.
Here he is watching a friend paint: "the gate was burred, the found brush stiff. You worked/the thickening color like heat/into a sore shoulder." Even more remarkable in this collection are the flashes of wisdom and moral clarity... This poet's intelligence, combined with profound humility, produces moments as bright as the blaze on the waves at noon. -- Enid Shomer, author of Black Drum and This Close to the Earth
This is a book that transcends the writer and reader as we know them and forces us to look at the inherent contradictions in our own lives. Morrill's experiences of love, loss, friendship, family and life are my experiences. As I am compelled to go to work today because my three-year-old daughter says,"Mommie, you have to," I am further compelled to see how Morrill has recorded our collective experience in his honest and searing poems. In the end, he offers us a fine collection of well-crafted poems successfully balancing head and heart. -- Kristine Snodgrass, Organica News
A poem from With Your Back to Half the Day
It's prideful, of course
It's prideful, of course, but I admit I love poorly--
which is not the same as, in youth, confessing
I've been a lousy lover. Age makes us grateful for love,
so attention is welcome even by the suffering and betrayed;
even spouses will hope we might become what they think we were.
They don't want that so much as the poetry in our pockets now.
The spouses go to bed early, yes, at this time of marriage.
And, remaining, we're relieved and disturbed by not knowing
how to perform as we have for other years.
We might well perform again when shown how we undid.
There are things to say in this. But the things avoided
are not so much unsaid as wordless.
One sits alone and is not one. One does the last dishes
and wonders should the next page in the novel be turned?
Should the wine in the glass enter one? The triumph
is discovering that there's still pleasure and satisfaction,
though it's difficult without the unmockable look.
How far dare I go with this before I fall asleep and sober up?
How far does anybody go when they enter or receive?
No one knows when it's the beginning. Oh, the hands,
my hands, are assured in memory. My heart--
not much different from every protagonist.
I'm faithful to habit, hating its romance, and I'm breaking.
Love, I know you are, too, and just as frightened.
Yet there are no words because time is with us and against us.