Review: The Domimion

My pal and colleague Amanda Jernigan pointed out this review at the grassroots indie journalism site The Dominion by email, under the subject heading “Dept. of brightening one’s day” — and it surely does. The reviews have been almost uniformly positive to this point, which pleases me more than I thought it would!

The Rush to Here
George Murray
Nightwood Editions, 2007

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. The rhymes are sometimes based on sound (as in homophones), but more often centered around meaning – synonyms, antonyms, association, etc. To illustrate from a randomly chosen sonnet, “Lullaby”: Murray rhymes ‘utmost’ with ‘paramount,’ ‘receive’ with ‘tuned’ (think radios), ‘signal’ with ‘pulse,’ ‘light’ with ‘dawn,’ ‘time’ with ‘ancestor,’ ‘does’ with ‘execute,’ and ‘rage’ with ‘blaze.’ 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. In terms of subject matter, Murray covers a lot of ground – from reflections on parenthood to the implications of quantum physics, from the sex lives of the Devil and the Greek gods to the annoyance of home renovations. The Rush to Here is worth rushing out for.

Review: Scandinavian Airlines Magazine

Behold the bizarre wonder of the world wide web. The following is an entire review of The Rush to Here (pdf) printed in a Scandinavian Airlines Magazine and hosted at the website of an unopened resort in Sri Lanka — note that none of the books reviewed are illustrated with the correct picture.

THE RUSH TO HERE
George Murray
NIGHTWOOD EDITIONS
The fourth poetry collection from the founding editor of the excellent Book Ninja site comprises 96 pages of sonnets that transcend the traditional limitations of formal verse. Highly imaginative, and yet surprisingly approachable and immediately accessible.

I feel like standing up to salute the insanity that is the internet.

Review: Lemon Hound

Another very positive review for The Rush to Here, this time from the US, and forwarded to me by a friend. (Excerpt below). After last week’s trip to Chicago and Manhattan to read, I was somewhat surprised and very pleased to come home with a few more course list placements for the book. It seems prof-types really get off on the use of concepts in place of sounds for fulfilling the rhyme obligations of the sonnet. It allows students access to the mechanics of the form while reading in their own vernacular. Plus, they seem to like the poems themselves. (One such academic writes: “your book, which I’ve been reading, is kicking my ass. Come spring, know that you’re officially on the syllabus.” I like professors who talk like that.) Lemon Hound seems more interested in the emotional quality of the poetry, which is a nice contrast to those impressed with the technical fun.

George Murray, in his latest book, just out with Nightwood, and a much more emotionally engaging and present book than his earlier two with M&S, soars.

Perhaps this is a poet coming into his own, a poet back in Canada, a poet settling into poetry, but there is more lightness here, more range, and a directness of voice–clear the speaker, clear the audience, that line, very direct. These are companionable poems. Mind, they aren’t a perfect companion for this poet, but I can certainly recognize their companionability and further, can imagine them being carried around and dogeared. For this poet, that is the ultimate compliment.
…
What makes this poetry interesting to me, aside from its formal concerns, is its willingness to wonder about the human condition, not simply to describe, or tell (more on this as I work on an essay on lyric, Jan Zwicky and Anne Simpson). I can go far with any voice that creates a space for me in a poem, a poet that invites me into their world (world that rings true). I grow so weary of the faux revelations in poetry, the earnest tone that mocks sincerity. There’s none of that here.

Review: Winnipeg Free Press

When I gave a reading last week in Winnipeg, a smartly-dressed fellow showed up with my book already in-hand. Turns out he was Maurice Mierau, the poetry reviewer for the Free Press. He seemed like a nice guy so, luckily, what he had to say was also nice:

St. John’s writer George Murray’s third book is The Rush to Here (Nightwood, 84 pages, $17). It consists entirely of sonnets, and is dedicated to the late Richard Outram, whose formalist poems were quite distinct from the loose conversational tone of most Canadian poetry.

The Autumn of Our Sameness is one of many beautiful pieces here, ending with this couplet: The leaves shiver themselves from the branches,/ much as a half-year back the seeds jumped from the twigs.”

Murray captures the rhetorical shape of the sonnet while avoiding its traditional prosody. He rarely goes into blank verse, and mostly eschews even near-rhyme.

This limits his acoustic palette, but he 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.

Remember to buy a copy at your local bookstore or, barring that, through somewhere a little larger today.

Review: JIVE Magazine

My publisher pointed out this nice little review. It’s nice that it has a populist angle to it, as though regular everyday people are enjoying poetry. How hopeful and refreshing.

These days it seems that everywhere you look people are combining many activities into one. We drive and talk on the phone; we work while eating lunch. From this, it appears that we are the ultimate multi-taskers. The thing is, with all this mundane multi-tasking, it is definitely easier to aimlessly run through life rather than to actually living in the moment. Lucky for us, George Murray in his latest collection of poetry, the rush to here, seeks to explore the ideas of time and human nature in a way that is vivid, stripped down and frank. The language that he uses is a beautiful mixture of the colloquial and the literary, like in “Rearview Mirror” when hair and scarves are going “shitcrazy” from the wind (10). Besides the concrete language he employs, his poems take the shape of short, sonnet-like forms that work perfectly to capture exactly the image and moment Murray was going for. For instance, in “Truck Stop Gothic,” the speaker recalls a past job as a cook at some greasy spoon when he sliced the head of a fly and went back to making sandwiches without hesitation. Throughout George Murray’s the rush to here, there are moments and images that many people can relate to making it a great book for anyone to pick up for themselves or a friend.

Review: The Globe and Mail

There’s a nice review of The Rush to Here by Ewan Whyte in Canada’s national newspaper, The Globe and Mail. It’s quite laudatory, but a little choppy. It seems to capture the spirit of the book well enough and I’m very pleased to be reviewed with A.F. Moritz and his son Blaise. I read with Blaise in Toronto recently and loved his work, and of course I’m a very long time fan of Al. Al edited my third book The Hunter, so he’s a bit of a poetic, if not biological, father to me too.

from The Globe and Mail

In contrast, George Murray explores a variety of subjects: ex-girlfriends, bloody operations, social decay, children skateboarding on war monuments in sight of a soldier selling poppies, and other atypical sonnet themes. The Rush to Here is a rush to everywhere. Form, not theme, is what defines Murray’s fourth book of poetry, which consists entirely of modified sonnets, where every poem is recognizably a variation of this traditional poetic form.

Murray, an Ontarian who now lives in St. John’s, has constrained himself to 14 lines in each poem, with usually 10 to 12 beats per line. However, they do not follow standard sonnet rhyming schemes. Instead, 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.

In his sonnet Plain Jane, we find three strange bedfellows, God and Death and the French Philosopher Jean Baudrillard:

                Who knows what we’ll endure

next in this find-a-dollar daydream
always under the falling anvil’s allure.
Yes, I see you there, hiding, lost in thought.

Baudrillard says all this is how we seduce
ourselves into forgetting about the grave.
God is fear’s ghost, I say, but remain unconvinced.

Reading Murray engenders thoughts subtly mystical, feelings revolving around the wonder of imperfection. In the opening quatrains in one of his most innovative poems, A Moment’s Autograph, we discover there is:

Still enough sky-glow left to distinguish
colour, even as the trees descend
through the registers of green and the stoop
becomes shrouded and difficult to discern.

From a crack in the dark wall hang loose wires:
give a tug and watch society start
to unravel. There’s no real need to begin
worry, just be aware where the pulling leads.

At times, the language of these poems is aggressive, even hostile, meant to engage the reader in debate and discourse. Traditional sonnets these are not, nor do they have a narrative or thematic sweep as a collection, but individually, many poems in The Rush to Here are striking, inspired and sturdy.

Review: The Independent

The first review of my new book, The Rush to Here, appeared today in the Newfoundland Independent, penned by local poetry impresario Mark Callanan. There’s no link online, so I copy it below.

Ode to form
With a little ‘thought rhyme’ a new sonnet is born

Mark Callanan

The Rush to Here by George Murray
Nightwood Editions, 2007, 79 pages

When Robert Frost famously asserted he’d “just as soon play tennis ith the net down” as write free verse, he was thumbing his nose at poetry that played by no rules. He might have been pleased, then, to see that after a long dalliance in free verse modes of expression, Canadian poetry seems to have returned to use of form. The sonnet, particularly, is enjoying a new heyday.

Most of us have at least a passing familiarity with its two basic incarnations: 14 lines broken down into an eight-line setup (the octave), and the sea change that plunges us into the six-line conclusion (the sestet) of the Petrarchan sonnet, or the twelve line setup and two line conclusion of the Shakespearian sonnet. The beauty of the sonnet lies in the economy of its expression, and in its potential for variation.

From John Milton to Paul Muldoon, poets have been adapting the sonnet to suit their needs for hundreds of years. Ever since its appearance as a recognizable form in 13th century Italy, the sonnet has survived the loss of regularized metre, had its number of lines knocked about (see Gerald Stern’s twenty-odd lined American Sonnets), and otherwise been pinched and pulled to near unrecognizability.

In The Rush to Here, recent Newfoundland import George Murray adds another trick to the sonneteers repertoire, the “thought-rhyme.” The idea is simple enough: thought rhymes are conceptual rather than auditory in nature, bound by associations of meaning rather than tonal similarities. So, Murray can rhyme sun with light, scarves with flags,
or — less directly — bull with harassed.

There is plenty of room for playful punning here as well. Murray pairs the verb fall with autumn; bucket “rhymes” with the homonymous pale. The resulting poems are part formal experiments and part freely associative meditations on the process of maturation and the struggle towards greater self-knowledge — the stuff of the past arriving at
the present tense.

“Once I cooked in a greasy roadside spoon,” Murray writes in Truck Stop Gothic:

just like this, and during one rotten
lunch rush swiped my stainless steel knife
at a passing fly, cutting its head clean off,

right through where a neck should be. I felt divided….

The speaker, having admitted that he then “went back to slicing / toasted western triangles in a trance” with his soiled knife, apologizes to a nameless you (presumably the reader) who may have eaten that particular sandwich order. “And the quick death hiding in the bread’s darkness? / Sorry you tasted such greatness and never knew.”

Though Murray tends to vary the rhyming pattern of his opening 12 lines, he always ends on the double hammer strike of the rhyming couplet (as in the Shakespearian sonnet form). The result is often of an epigrammatic nature that could stand on its own: “It can be tricky to let yourself go / ways other than those you came in by” (Distilled Water); “There are so few barriers to proper sense, / but sense is among them, if you get my drift” (The Corner); “Open your mouth and fill it with food or rage. / The same leaf that turns to the light shies from the blaze” (Lullaby).

Purists of form poetry might be tempted to point out that the musicality of the well-placed end rhyme is absent here, and that, in choosing sense over sound, Murray has eliminated one of the sonnet’s chief virtues: its ability to insinuate itself into our consciousness through the pattern of the auditory echoes it creates. And while it’s true that we respond more viscerally to sound than we do to conceptual echoes, these poems are aimed more at the head than the heart.

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.

–End–

Review: A Set of Deadly Negotiations

The beautiful litte chapbook I did with Frog Hollow Press was just reviewed in “Canada’s National Poetry Magazine” Arc by poet and critic Amanda Jernigan.

Read the review here.

As I mentioned previously, there was also a brief review in Books in Canada, and I have now found a link to it on the Books in Canada website.

Read the review here.

Not bad for an artisan chapbook with fourteen poems. One more would be a nice hat trick. I credit all the success to the design and editing.

Review: A Set of Deadly Negotiations

It is very uncommon to see a review of a chapbook appearing in a major paper or journal, so many thanks to Books in Canada’s poetry editor Carmine Starnino for profiling the magnificent Frog Hollow Press; and in turn, my thanks to Caryl Peters and Shane Neilson, FH’s proprietor and editor, for asking me to participate in one of their private endeavours.

The following micro-review appeared in Books in Canada, January/February 2006.

A Set of Deadly Negotiations
George Murray
Frog Hollow Press: Victoria, 2005

Caryl Peters’s design for this chapbook includes the image of a small dangling spider, which is brilliantly appropriate for Murray’s poetry. Every line shimmers with seduction and the possibility of danger, a savage beauty and ruthless efficiency. Certain poems, such as “The Beautiful Hands of Skeptical Women” and “An Evolution of Injury,” fuse violence, sensuality, and grace into a seamless whole that feels both familiar and vaguely predatory. These poems describe a gossamer world where “rain falls in prison bars” and the “future floats foetal through a landscape/ of broken teacups and toppled salt pillars.” Technically these poems are as intricate and fine as a dew-covered web; rhetorical questions and capitalization are used competently and significantly, punctuation with an elegant touch, parentheses sparingly and with a haunting sense of the possible. “Weather the shape of eggs,” memory, hope, “humanity opening like nesting dolls,” the “tiny cannibalisms of everyday,” “one burning city,” “the hourglass body, the sandy soul” – the poetic voice treats each subject reverently, as a delicacy to be savoured. The reader of this collection is a fly in George Murray’s parlour, hypnotized by his rhythm and assonance, fascinated with his philosophical ruminations, and surprised by the “sheer range of darkness and light.”

–Matthew Trafford