News: Pick of St. Patrick’s Day

I was asked by Globe Books Editor Martin Levin to submit names of writers one turns to on St. Patrick’s Day for a bit of the Irish, but didn’t have time to properly compile an answer. Poet Aislinn Hunter, however, did, and she took an interesting tack: naming names from Newfoundland’s Irish Loop instead of from good old Dooblin. I think she has particularly good taste, as you might guess, because she mentions yours truly and The Rush to Here.

Aislinn Hunter, Vancouver-based poet and novelist, asks “does the Irish Loop count?” (The Irish Loop is part of Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula – and it does count.)

Poetry by Patrick Warner (b. Ireland, resident St. John’s), fiction by Joel Thomas Hynes (whose Irish Loop book Down to the Dirt was just made into a gut-wrenchingly wonderful film), and the recent poetry books by St. John’s poets George Murray (The Rush to Here) and Agnes Walsh (Going Around with Bachelors).

News: The Hunter at ARC’s How Poems Work

The opening poem from my 2003 book, The Hunter, is under review at ARC Magazine’s How Poems Work feature this month. Nigel Beale examines the poem from his perspective, providing his key for reading it. I used to like the “How Poems Work” feature in the Globe and Mail a few years ago, so it’s nice that ARC has decided to continue the tradition of providing individual readings for individual poems.

The poem works then because it attaches itself to canonical words, pushes through intriguing sets of thin, thought-provoking binary opposites, looks at the horizon, and formulates a complicated commentary both on the globe’s future physical environment, and humankind’s perilous rejection of wise thinking in favour of greedy consumption. In short, the poem’s complex ambiguity invites engagement: it’s not too late to save the world from ignorant human behaviour. Alternatively, Murray himself has described the Hunter as angry, and the poem’s ‘Promised Land’ can just as easily be interpreted ironically, apocalyptically, as it can hopefully.

The poem succeeds because neither it, nor its central character is static. He changes, like most of us do, over time. The ‘he’ in the poem evolves from a dissatisfied beast into an insatiable destroyer, from a threatening spirit, to, in the end, a loving hopeful human being struggling simply to stay alive who is intent, possibly, on creating a better world—or at least on trying to save this one. Godlike, beaten, but not dead. Not yet, at least while there is still the capacity to ‘look up’, to hope, despite a barren landscape. Resurrected. Mail fisted.

Review: Prairie Fire Review of Books

A nice little review of The Rush to Here in the Prairie Fire Review of Books was just brought to my attention. It’s amazing to see this book still getting reviewed two years later. I like how newspaper reviews allow for immediate reaction while journals take some time and perspective with their editorial. Anyway, thanks to Prairie Fire for the kind words. Excerpts below, full review here.

The writing never lets me down. It is continually smart and revealing, almost conversant and colloquial, but pulling back with the shine of poetry. The overall tone sounds world aware and observant rather than world weary.
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Murray doesn’t cheapen experience. He examines it from any number of perspectives, and yet sets nothing in stone.

The sidetracks within the poems are a modus operandi. What’s likely to be said is skirted in favour of a tangent or dipsy doodle. In motion-picture parlance, these are jump cuts that command attention, and a slowing down. A simple phrase like “Your turn is today” (70) means life is short, but, in the grand scheme of things, that your turn is the equivalent of one short day. I’m stopped. I recognize this poignancy in the face of the ongoing diurnal events. “Mostly the world waits / / patiently. Mostly people get on / with things. / Mostly they are unaware / of waiting.” Enjoy the art! Oh yes, this is one wonderful book.

Review: Below the Spruce

Blogger Rowe reviews The Rush to Here. Very nice to see citizen journalists filling in the critical gaps as the book sections die out. First and last paragraphs of the full review excerpted below. Thanks for the kind words, Stephen Rowe.

At some point in their writing careers, most poets will try their hand a sonnet or two. There’s almost a sense that in order to be a successful poet one must prove an ability to write a successful sonnet. This is probably a burden self-imposed upon poets due to the enormous weight of The Tradition. For centuries the sonnet has been one of the most standard forms of poetry in English and many masters have developed and added to the form over the years (think of Shakespeare, Donne, Hopkins, Rossetti, St. Vincent Millay, and Cummings to name a few), leaving writers of today with a wealth of building blocks from which to construct their own contributions.
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In an age when writers often produce works in the style of their own mentors, merely continuing an already established tradition, George Murray has created something new for poetry that others can add to their repertoires. He has, in a sense, inked his own stamp on form, which, if nothing else, embues poetry with a little more life and opens up realms of creativity for prospective poets.

Review: Matrix Magazine

A nice review in the new Matrix Magazine (not available online, so pasted below). We poets may not get a great number of reviews anymore, but what reviews we do get can trail in over two, three or even four years, which can make for nice (or I suppose nasty) surprises. This little one is yet another “nice” for The Rush to Here. What are you waiting for?

The Rush to Here
By George Murray
Nightwood Editions, 2007
Read by Jakub Stachurski

“From a crack in the dark wall hang loose wires: / give a tug and watch society start / to unravel,” writes George Murray in “A Moment’s Autograph,” one of the opening poems of his fourth collection. It is a fitting introduction, as the four sequences of poems offer a kind of unraveling, an examination of the unseen, unaccounted moments of our lives: “The soft applause of snow on the window / has left you with the impression of being / watched.” Though many of the poems are borne of the speaker’s internal condition, they are never elusive or heady, as Murray moors his complex, often unanswered questions in evocative imagery. The three quatrains and closing couplet are recognizable and the form of the sonnet lends cohesion to an astounding range of subject matter, as Murray moves from Greek mythology to urban paranoia to god and the secular world.

Straying from a traditional sonnet’s rhyme schemes, Murray employs thought-rhymes, at times clear synonymic or antonymic pairings, at other times conceptual parallels or contrasts. This format is not apparent at the outset of most poems but slowly builds to create a level of tension within each piece. Conflict is an integral part of the sonnet form and this is perhaps the strongest aspect of the
collection, as Murray’s speakers are often alone, unrequited and unanswered (“you spend an extra night alone with the lust / that keeps you lonely, and nothing new comes / of it, no catastrophic difference”). There are no easy answers, no pseudo-revelations be found here. There is an underlying sense of hope but it is hard-won.

The expansive subject matter and intensity in Murray’s discourse leave the reader in a reflective state, akin to the trance-like state one enters, having covered vast tracts of space, on a road trip. As with any good road trip, one finishes The Rush to Here affected in an inexplicable manner, even shaken, and all the better for it.

Awards: CAA Poetry Award unofficial “shortlist”

I received a lovely letter and citation from DC Reid of British Columbia, who wrote to tell me he’d been one of two judges for the Canadian Authors Association Poetry Award, a prize that doesn’t publish a shortlist (excellent poet Asa Boxer won, so congratulations to him), and that my 2007 book, The Rush to Here, had made it to the top five.

It’s extremely kind and classy of Mr. Reid to write, so I send my thanks and regards. I also note that he’s bang-on about the importance of shortlists, especially in the poetry world in Canada, where chances for recognition are few and far between.

His letter is excerpted below.

…I read your spectacular book, the rush to here, as a juror on the CAA Award for a book of poetry from 2007.

The judging was blind, as in neither I nor the other person knew who the other was, nor had any contact. After battling through 103 books, both of us put your book on our individual top 10 list. Subsequently your book made it to the top five short list. So both of us thought a great deal of your work.

While your book was not the ultimate winner, I wanted to let you know that you made it to the top five. I asked the CAA to publish a shortlist, as that is pretty much just as good, and is important to writers. They declined for 2007.

But I wanted to reach out and let you know because we poets tend to exist in our corners not knowing whether we have connected with anyone out there. It’s a confidence thing for following books; hence my reason for sending this letter….

Well put, I think. And here is his citation, copied in full from his website dcreid.ca

the rush to here – George Murray, Nightwood Editions

At once recognizable as a great book, the rush to here, effortlessly explores the sonnet in all of its permutations and is so neat in its execution, so Shakespearian in its lush authority that it sneaks up on a reader and takes him/her by the throat. There are quotable completely-full-of-themselves epigrams in each and every poem. From Silence is a Dead Language: What you’re looking for is ingenuity / enough to let ambition go: to find / yourself building the simple, the clever, / suddenly satisfied with what’s appearing // at the ends of your much-surprised hands. This is supple, sure, intelligent swelling of incandescence abundance. What impresses is the magic of great poetry captured in one of the western hemisphere’s millennia-long traditional forms, overleaping in one easy – for Murray – step one current retrograde neo-conservative stream in Canadian poetry that holds up structure as the only important consideration in poetry. The rush to here blows that movement completely apart even though it’s not intending to. This guy is so smart so sparklingly clear in his poetic invocations that every line rings as clear as a glass tinged by a fingernail. You want the music to continue and continue in its arpeggio octaves.

So very kind and generous of him to advocate for a shortlist. Maybe CAA will change their minds in the future?

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.
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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.