The Sentence by Morri Creech
Review by Millie Tullis.
Morri Creech’s The Sentence begins with “The Sentence” (one of three poems in the collection with this title): “Death is a nagging grit, that grain I keep / worrying furiously into the pearl of art— // how is that for an opening sentence?” An Ars Poetica, this poem examines what it means to build a sentence, to make art from language’s shared material:
A belief
the sentence will not end, since it is not
being—indeed it must not be--
spoken by me alone: each time we speak
a dead man’s word, his lips move in the grave.
The writer builds a sentence in isolation, but a sentence is also always in conversation with the living and the dead—those we share language with. The first poem, closing with “a dead man’s word,” is an appropriate entry point for this collection. A formalist poet, Creech displays his impressive control over language while resurrecting many of life’s heavy question marks—art, memory, self, death. But the poems in The Sentence are not just beautifully made. Creech’s poems offer his reader more mystery than solution, more thinking than questions.
In “Witness,” Creech interrogates the difficult relationship between art and death when the speaker witnesses a fatal car crash as their uncles hunt deer nearby. The flipped-over car and the woman inside of it draw the speaker: “You scramble closer to the wreck and see / she’s still as starlight. Pinned there. She can’t move. / Somewhere a gear is clicking in its grove.” The speaker is uncomfortable identifying beauty in a moment of horror, seeing “[t]he way the glass-chips in the snow are lit / seems beautiful, a fact you don’t admit.” The dissonance of this moment is amplified when the deer arrives.
And that’s when it capers into the road. The deer.
It stands there a minute, startled. Then it runs
before the men come shouting with their guns.
Just how long you stand watching isn’t clear.
At the poem’s close, the speaker confesses, “Years from now, when you recall this morning, / it won’t be the blur of metal you think of first.” It won’t be the image of the car flipping, the radio, or the weather the speaker remembers first. “It won’t even be the dead girl they pulled out / from a strew of glass. No. You’ll think about / the deer. How it glanced up at you. And was gone.”
In these philosophical poems, Creech anchors readers with striking imagery, both natural and surreal. In “Twilight,” philosophical questions are put “on hold.” Creech writes: “Philosophers take note: / a barn dissolves into the muffling mist.” In a series of prose poems, “The Trial,” Creech tells the surreal story of “Joseph K.” who sneaks into his court trial wearing “a blue suit” and “a false mustache which he had fixed to his upper lip with spirit gum…” Despite the lively courtroom discourse, K. can only hear “the steady typing of the court stenographer,” who, at the end of the poem, reveals that she holds “buried in the folds of her shirt… the irrefutable evidence that had so long been kept from him.” The nature of this “evidence” is not resolved in the poem. Rather, this image closes the poem by prying its mystery open—the evidence arrives in the poem, though we never see, hold, or understand it.
Reading The Sentence is time well spent with the mind of a remarkable writer. That is what reading Creech’s poetry felt like for me: thinking alongside each speaker, thinking inside each form. Creech’s poems are a tool for thinking, and the forms Creech uses—the logic of their rhymes and meters—deepen the thinking experience of reading his poems. One of my favorite examples comes from “The Reason.” A poem composed of couplets, the last word of each second line ends on “reason.” In the poem, reasons belong to several entities: God has reasons, the heart has reasons, and individuals employ reason. Reason abounds in the poem, though in increasingly strange and troubling ways. The poem leaves the speaker alone with reason:
Another late-night jag, the waking with my cheek
on the same cold tile, the exonerating reason--
Morri, I ask the mirror, why all these dark lines?
I’m just a rhyme, he says. You are the reason.
Morri Creech’s The Sentence begins with “The Sentence” (one of three poems in the collection with this title): “Death is a nagging grit, that grain I keep / worrying furiously into the pearl of art— // how is that for an opening sentence?” An Ars Poetica, this poem examines what it means to build a sentence, to make art from language’s shared material:
A belief
the sentence will not end, since it is not
being—indeed it must not be--
spoken by me alone: each time we speak
a dead man’s word, his lips move in the grave.
The writer builds a sentence in isolation, but a sentence is also always in conversation with the living and the dead—those we share language with. The first poem, closing with “a dead man’s word,” is an appropriate entry point for this collection. A formalist poet, Creech displays his impressive control over language while resurrecting many of life’s heavy question marks—art, memory, self, death. But the poems in The Sentence are not just beautifully made. Creech’s poems offer his reader more mystery than solution, more thinking than questions.
In “Witness,” Creech interrogates the difficult relationship between art and death when the speaker witnesses a fatal car crash as their uncles hunt deer nearby. The flipped-over car and the woman inside of it draw the speaker: “You scramble closer to the wreck and see / she’s still as starlight. Pinned there. She can’t move. / Somewhere a gear is clicking in its grove.” The speaker is uncomfortable identifying beauty in a moment of horror, seeing “[t]he way the glass-chips in the snow are lit / seems beautiful, a fact you don’t admit.” The dissonance of this moment is amplified when the deer arrives.
And that’s when it capers into the road. The deer.
It stands there a minute, startled. Then it runs
before the men come shouting with their guns.
Just how long you stand watching isn’t clear.
At the poem’s close, the speaker confesses, “Years from now, when you recall this morning, / it won’t be the blur of metal you think of first.” It won’t be the image of the car flipping, the radio, or the weather the speaker remembers first. “It won’t even be the dead girl they pulled out / from a strew of glass. No. You’ll think about / the deer. How it glanced up at you. And was gone.”
In these philosophical poems, Creech anchors readers with striking imagery, both natural and surreal. In “Twilight,” philosophical questions are put “on hold.” Creech writes: “Philosophers take note: / a barn dissolves into the muffling mist.” In a series of prose poems, “The Trial,” Creech tells the surreal story of “Joseph K.” who sneaks into his court trial wearing “a blue suit” and “a false mustache which he had fixed to his upper lip with spirit gum…” Despite the lively courtroom discourse, K. can only hear “the steady typing of the court stenographer,” who, at the end of the poem, reveals that she holds “buried in the folds of her shirt… the irrefutable evidence that had so long been kept from him.” The nature of this “evidence” is not resolved in the poem. Rather, this image closes the poem by prying its mystery open—the evidence arrives in the poem, though we never see, hold, or understand it.
Reading The Sentence is time well spent with the mind of a remarkable writer. That is what reading Creech’s poetry felt like for me: thinking alongside each speaker, thinking inside each form. Creech’s poems are a tool for thinking, and the forms Creech uses—the logic of their rhymes and meters—deepen the thinking experience of reading his poems. One of my favorite examples comes from “The Reason.” A poem composed of couplets, the last word of each second line ends on “reason.” In the poem, reasons belong to several entities: God has reasons, the heart has reasons, and individuals employ reason. Reason abounds in the poem, though in increasingly strange and troubling ways. The poem leaves the speaker alone with reason:
Another late-night jag, the waking with my cheek
on the same cold tile, the exonerating reason--
Morri, I ask the mirror, why all these dark lines?
I’m just a rhyme, he says. You are the reason.
Millie Tullis (she/her) is a writer, teacher, folklorist, and researcher. She holds an MFA from George Mason University and an MA in American Studies & Folklore from Utah State University. Her work has been published in Sugar House Review, Rock & Sling, Cimarron Review, Ninth Letter, SWWIM, and elsewhere. Millie is the Editor-in-Chief of Psaltery & Lyre, an online literary journal. Raised in northern Utah, she lives in upstate South Carolina.
