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