In The Sentence, Morri Creech interrogates our daily lives and experiences to examine the anxieties and despair that often attend our awareness of mortality. Through a variety of subjects, and through styles ranging from rhyme and meter to prose poetry, he takes an unflinching look at what it means to live in the shadow of the end, the common fate to which each of us is sentenced.

The Sentence: Poems

Literature & Fiction

Creech, Morri

Poetry

LSU Press

Displaying a range of voices and subjects―from dramatic monologues in the voices of Judas Iscariot and John the Baptist to harrowing personal lyrics of family, time, memory, and loss―Creech’s poems examine the difficulties of belief and the transcendent possibilities of common experience, pushing beyond mere surfaces to explore the “kingdom of desire.” Paper Cathedrals confronts the tensions between the here and hereafter, gravity and grace, and religious faith and an allegiance to the passing, sensual world.

Paper Cathedrals (Wick Poetry First Book)

The Kent State University Press

The first winner of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize contains formal poetry of uncommon grace and profundity that touches betimes upon the infusion of the sacred into the profane, modernity's willful alienation from the sacred, and the delights of verbal wit."" --Booklist ""'Field Knowledge' is intelligent, remarkably dexterous and inventive in its use of form, and-line by line- often dazzling..."" --The Antioch Review

Field Knowledge

Between the Lines

Poetry. Morri Creech's third collection of poems, THE SLEEP OF REASON, is a lyrical examination of liminal states of consciousness and experience — the shadowy terrain between sleep and waking, dream and nightmare, life and death, history and the present moment. Including both a surprising take on Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" and a dark meditation on the perils of the sublime, THE SLEEP OF REASON explores the anxieties, horrors, and dreams that flash just beneath the surface of the waking mind, combining formal elegance and an acknowledgment of literary tradition with a fresh, contemporary voice. "It's a rare thing in this day and age to encounter a poet unafraid to think out loud and, moreover, one who possesses the lyric gifts and intellectual savvy to translate those thoughts into the material realities of everyday life. Formal and mimetic, elegiac and acerbic, equally at home with a painting from the Dutch Golden Age and the circus sprawl of popular culture, THE SLEEP OF REASON is as accomplished and intrepid a book of poems as one is likely to find." —Sherod Santos "Situations in these poems are 'ordinary,' a man, say, at the start of a day, looking in a mirror, looking out a window, carrying out the trash, having a job, having a family, having a self, and wondering how it is doing, wondering what his future and his past and this day are; and writing about these things in beautiful expressive lines of verse, faithful measured lines with their varied subtle pressures and subtle cadences, responsive to the variety of pressures and cadences of the thoughts and feelings of the life being lived." —David Ferry

The Sleep of Reason

The Waywiser Press

Poetry. A former winner of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Morri Creech is one of America's finest poets. His fourth collection, BLUE ROOMS, explores the uncertain terrain between conscious perception and the objective world. This new collection includes powerful lyric sequences that examine Magritte's surreal investigations of the elusive self, Cezanne's attempts to limn the dynamic nature of reality, and Goya's unflinching depictions of cosmic and historical horrors--all while balancing rich language with an exacting formal control. "In these poems, Morri Creech, one of our finest formal poets, confronts the fundamental mystery of language--the way the world is captured by and transformed into words. In the tradition of Wallace Stevens, he combines philosophical insight with eloquence and wit, as he marvels at how the mind is able 'to conjure matter purely through perception.'"--Adam Kirsch "BLUE ROOMS is a clear-sighted book, arresting in the beauty of its imaginative and linguistic artistry, but also in the elegiac power it wrings from the poet's dead-level doubts about the whole idea of arresting beauty with imagination and language. Creech pushes these anxieties past conventional literary paradox into the realm of human consequence, till they open out, naturally, into a number of serial meditations that furnish the poet with occasions to ponder the limits of memory, experience, perception, and reality itself, all with his usual tact and acuity. Then, in the same book, Creech can turn around and give us, in a less speculative vein, 'The Confession,' a devastating monologue, spoken by one of the perpetrators of a lynching, that affirms the promise of good poetry as a spur to serious moral reflection. Morri Creech engages and challenges his reader, and himself, at the intellectual, philosophical, and emotional levels, and the result is a truly dynamic and remarkable book."--Joshua Mehigan "These lucid, elegant poems suggest an indebtedness to Wallace Stevens and Anthony Hecht, but it is primarily the late Howard Nemerov whose temperament and genius Morri Creech has so brilliantly rechanneled in BLUE ROOMS. Like his precursor, Creech attends to the everyday (what he calls 'the modest raptures of the ordinary') with grace and gravity, to move us 'beyond the reach of language.' This stunning, compact volume delicately leads us from the familiar to the infinite, blending together seamlessly the imagined and the real. I loved reading this book."--Willard Spiegelman

Blue Rooms