Noise and Stories

With a bow to recent masters like Justice, Wright, and even Nemerov, John Morris's poems explore the uncertain footing of middle age. The characters we meet are clear-eyed, straight-faced, occasionally nonplussed. They're uncertain of their allegiance to either comfort or anguish. And their ciphering of the debts and credits of their days creates little dramas we can recognize as something like our own. Cars are "rust-colored, late-modeled;" poems "twist into failing origami;" and an old hi...