Books
The Rush to Here
(Nightwood Editions, 2007)
from The Globe and Mail
“The Rush to Here is a rush to everywhere. … Murray employs something he calls “thought-rhymes,” which appear to be parallels or conceptual variations that take the place of conventional rhyming. Indeed, many of his line endings are inventive, hinting at notions that can never be realized, while also mirroring the everyday wanderings of our daydreams. … Reading Murray engenders thoughts subtly mystical, feelings revolving around the wonder of imperfection. …the language of these poems is aggressive, even hostile, meant to engage the reader in debate and discourse. Traditional sonnets these are not, … [the] poems in The Rush to Here are striking, inspired and sturdy.”
from The Independent
“In reading Murray’s sonnets, the question to ask yourself is this: Is his innovation on rhyme a useful system for developing language as a memorable and insightful fashion, or does it amount to sleight-of-hand that only ever mimics magic? I would suggest he has hit on a means of expression that works well to coax out his weighty, witty meditations. It is another kind of spanner for the poet’s toolkit. The “thought rhyme” is a fascinating concept, and one that provides limitless potential for poetic investigation. These are poems well worth reading.”
from The Winnipeg Free Press
“[Murray] writes strikingly, usually structuring the pieces around linked metaphors. Often these links move into an achingly expressive line, like Push, whose second-last stanza ends “Lie here with me a bit and say the past exists.” Murray has a powerful ability to synthesize disparate ideas within a poem. A Silent Film, for example, moves from ancient triremes to silent films to contemporary storms and television. What might be messy in an open form is brilliantly contained in the traditional shape of the sonnet”
from The Dominion
“This new collection of poems from George Murray contains something truly new; he has written a series of sonnets using an entirely novel kind of rhyme. It sounds unlikely, but the results more than justify the flouting of convention. … While some writers might be tempted to let the innovation carry the collection, hoping for an audience enamoured of formal poetry, Murray takes the time to craft each poem into something thought-provoking and beautiful, so that a reader unfamiliar with sonnets might still be enthralled. …. The Rush to Here is worth rushing out for.”
from Eye Magazine
“Murray’s poems reflect his growing maturity and his interest in approaching writing as a profession and a craft. The Rush to Here — his fourth collection — features meditations on modern life rendered carefully in sonnet form, where echoes of Murray’s past as a teenage stoner with a Mohawk emerge beneath the voice of the contemplative adult in lines like, ‘The crushed grass evidence of collusion: / the animals fuck themselves to bleeding.’”
from ARC Magazine
“There is no moralizing in this book, and no psychologizing, no exploration of the ‘I.’ In fact, Murray’s use of pronouns is fascinating on this account. His “you”-the most frequent of the pronouns-could refer in the same poem to himself, depersonalizing the “I”, or it could refer to you, the reader, or in a generalized form of address, as “one”, it could refer to anyone, to all of us, and it is in this last mode that you end up reading all his pronouns. The sense of each phrase slips through the boundaries set up between us-me, you, they-by the familiar pronouns and goes as far as blurring the distinctions between figures, between child and adult, vandal and master. We are unbounded and aggregated; rather than contained willful individuals, we appear as a bunch of atoms in vague Brownian motion in some distant outpost of the universe. …he gives us his strength, his endless process of working out “the how-not-why of these perfect heartbeats”, his poetry of inquiry. … There is a unique mind at work here…”
The Hunter
(McClelland & Stewart, 2003)
from The Globe and Mail
“A spooky portrait … with a compelling tone and constellation of imagery – less a moral tale of Armageddon and more its soundtrack. Murray takes great risks with statement and image. …the collection is quite powerful, inventing an original way of seeing a world which seems to enjoy using its own tools against itself. The Hunter remakes the world with a frightening and evocative music.”
from The Toronto Star
“There’s … a life-and-death urgency here, but at a remove, as if Murray wanted to widen his scope from the close-up view of an individual to a panoramic perspective on humanity and the sweep of history. The Hunter is an ambitious, visionary collection with many haunting images. It’s chilling indeed…”
from The Quill and Quire
“Like Milton in Paradise Lost and many poets of the Western canon, Murray’s moralistic poems yearn for a golden age where man was part of the natural world… Beauty is what makes The Hunter such a compelling read. At this watershed moment in history, we are all looking for the beauty that lies somewhere between the ugliness of history and the ominous tone of prophesy.”
from Books in Canada
“For style, I think of John Ashbery’s prolix juxtapositions of estranging details, though I like Murray’s poems better (more definition, more purposeful clout, more definition between the poems). Murray has [Mark] Strand’s surreal clairvoyance, his cheeky wit. Murray works his magic by accumulation… by analogy with musical forms, whose effects are cumulative. Murray’s corrective influence invokes a hurried urgency, a nutty scrambling for an imaginative response that will jolt us awake, blow the lid off our complacency.”
from The Ottawa Citizen
“[The Hunter] draws a new language from the chaos and uncertainty of our time. … Imbued with an eerie, prophetic spirit. [It's] as if Murray sensed the coming storm.”
from MobyLives.com
“… experience haunts these pages, but so, too, does a sense of continuance, of a relentless quest for grace, in poems that combine an admirable grittiness with enviable elegance.”
The Cottage Builder’s Letter
(McClelland & Stewart, 2001)
from The National Post
“He has the poet’s instincts, the knack for turning a good phrase and the verbal grit and suppleness to keep the reader engaged. …an important talent.”
from CBC Newsworld’s (TV) On the Arts
“… haunting poems about people set off in some way against their environment… I really think that he has talent and he’ll do more.”
from Books in Canada
“There is a fine balance in Murray that makes his poems deeply persuasive. There is an atmosphere wherein past and present, the before and after of events, mingle to create the timeless history of a place.”
from The Globe and Mail
“These poems are well-crafted and observant…”
Carousel: A Book of Second Thoughts
(Exile Editions, 2000)
from The Globe and Mail
“Framed by a central metaphor (and often suitable for framing), the poems work Calvino-like variations on the theme of mortality. [Murray] demonstrates that a firm controlling metaphor in a poem need not obviate the free play of imagination. … This is a highly impressive first book.”
from Eye Weekly
“…unusually sharp line-to-line – with image rhyme, pun, ironic wordplay and a comedian’s sense of timing …borderline brilliant.”
from The Danforth Review
“…a wide range of tones and perspectives: poignant, comic, tragic, sardonic, and erotic. …one can only say that Murray has triumphed in his metaphor.”
