Awards: EJ Pratt Poetry Award

The Rush to Here was shortlisted for the EJ Pratt Poetry Prize!

The finalists for the EJ Pratt Poetry Award are:

Randall Maggs for “Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems” (Brick Books, 2008), a collection of conversational poems that follow the tragic trajectory of the life and work of one of hockey’s best goalies.

George Murray for “The Rush to Here” (Nightwood Editions, 2007), poems that combine what the poet calls “thought rhymes” with a structured sonnet form.

Agnes Walsh for “Going Around with Bachelors” (Brick Books, 2007), poems that employ the tang of Newfoundland language to meld the plain with the sophisticated.

Interview: The National Post

There’s a brief poetry-month interview with me up at the National Post’s book pages, Afterword. All the poets interviewed in the series so far (Stuart Ross, Anne Simpson, Zach Wells) have been asked the same questions, so you can get a sampling of personality types in the answers.

Who’s your favourite living poet — Canadian or otherwise — and why?

Geoffrey Hill is my favourite poet. He’s an Englishman living in Boston who’s quite possibly the greatest writer in the English language. He’s notoriously difficult and gleefully inaccessible. I find reading his poems like working on tough puzzles. I’m sure I don’t get all of his allusions, but I pride myself on those I do get.

Who’s one poet you pretend to know but in reality have never, ever read?

Ken Babstock (just kidding, Ken).

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.
…
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.

Publication: Alhambra Poetry Calendar

Last year a poem from The Rush to Here appeared in the international poetry calendar from Alhambra, and I was pleased to be asked to be part of it. It’s always chock full of (350+) great poets writing in English (there are French, German and Italian versions of the calendar available also), so I was doubly pleased to be asked again this year. A poem I published last winter in London Magazine will be reprinted in this year’s calendar, but on what date I have no idea. Last year I was in mid-January. It was kind of fun to flip the pages day-by-day, all these great poems flying by, and then suddenly come upon one of your own. I urge you to buy it, or put it on your gift list, and enjoy it throughout 2009. It’s publication date is October 22.

Events: Upcoming Readings in Ottawa and Toronto [UPDATE]

Just a reminder of the reading at the Tree Series in Ottawa next week, and an announcement of an upcoming gig at the IV Lounge in Toronto.

Tree Readings Series
August 26, 2008, 8pm
Ottawa Arts Court (at the corner of Nicholas Street and Daly Avenue)
Ottawa

IV Lounge Readings Series
September 12, 2008, 8pm
IV Lounge (across from the Art Gallery of Ontario on Dundas West)
Toronto

Apparently the IV Lounge Reading series has just been indefinitely cancelled. The bar owner is selling the place and it’s closing for renos. How sad. Hopefully, they can move it to another location, but I suspect not in time for my reading on Sept 12.

Event: Tree Reading Series, Ottawa

I will be reading at the Tree series in Ottawa on August 26th. If you’re in or near the capital, I hope you can make it.

Tree Reading Series
August 26, 2008, 7pm
Ottawa Arts Court (at the corner of Nicholas Street and Daly Avenue)

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.
…
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.