Poetry:Gerry Murphy's poetry is of that apparently-effortless kind that offers the pleasures of instant recognition and the consolations of certainty of touch:
Strange to say
I was elbow-deep in the dictionary
when you called.
Looking up the precise meaning
Of "exquisite". (
Too Lovely for Words)
The poem, as you would predict, turns into an occasion for defining what makes its dedicatee exquisite. Gracefully risk-taking, though, are the definitions themselves - "your fingers of salmon and destiny/ your breasts of apples and planets" - which offer no hostages to contemporary irony or macho understatement.
Lucidity has been a hallmark of Murphy's work over the years. Poem in One Breath, the first poem in End of Part One, from a collection published more than 20 years ago, exhibits the same clarity and unpunctuated ease, closing on "the remarkable ease/ with which you fill/ curved space" - where that "curved" both is and is not a transferred epithet. It balances in the last of this miniature's 13 lines, showing us something both about space as volume and about the curviness of "you". Lucidity, then, but not simplicity. Nor is the poetry in fact unpunctuated: instead, it relies profoundly - and accurately - on the music of line-break to create pauses and transactions of meaning for which most poets must deploy an arsenal of punctuation marks.
This is a poet who understands rhythm and voice as he understands the complexity of human emotion: not for nothing are the new poems here gathered under the rubric "The Psychopathology of Everyday Life". Paradoxically, this newer material visits more abstract and more culturally-defined territories than the stark emotional encounters of earlier volumes. There are so many versions and homages - after poets writing in English (Kathleen Jamie, August Kleinzahler, Paul Muldoon) as well as those from other languages - that one might have expected the section's title poem to be, instead, the quietly profound Translation and its Discontents. Its title after Freud reminds us that translation does indeed deal with the matter of "civilisation"; and this complexity is what makes it, like the other work in this elegant, serious book, a Big Project poem. Here it is in its entirety:
Stark moonlit silence
the brindled cat is chewing
the nightingale's tongue.
IF GERRY MURPHY practises a sort of poetic feng shui, decluttering his verse and the spacious page around it, John Wakeman's is a discursive presence, whose poetic voice, with its companionable charm, seems to have been caught, by A Sea Family, in the middle of a conversation. That is not to say that this collection lacks drama. The Sea Family of the title poem are the drowned, swept together into a final involuntary embrace by "the tides and the turning moon" - and indeed by the generous poetic will that offers them a shot at redemption, "amazed at the bright ships and the great fishes". Elsewhere, in Prodigal Son, Mnemosyne, the muse of memory, "eats her young and pines for them": as our own processes of aging devour not only our selves but our memories, retroactively rubbing us out. Simeon Stylites is harried by dust devils. Nouns raise mountains and build landscapes.
The very best pieces in the volume, though, are two strange parables. The Snow Woman and Passing the Parcel might be described, in the book's context, as prose poems; but they occupy a place in the tradition of vernacular story, which has nothing to do with the literary miniature. Both emerge from behind their fairy-story titles as black-hearted, archetypal accounts of the futility of desire. The Snow Woman's mythic vocabulary makes it hard to believe this is a new-minted story; while Passing the Parcel seems part of the soundscape of dream:
It was so big that a regiment of liveried footmen was needed to
roll it from child to child.
The music was played by a famous orchestra flown in from
Afghanistan.
An imagination with this kind of vivid range is one well worth spending time with.
Fiona Sampson is the editor of Poetry Review. Her latest collection is The Distance Between Us (2005)
End of Part One: New and Selected Poems By Gerry Murphy Dedalus, 202pp. €16 A Sea Family By John Wakeman Bradshaw Books, 56pp. €12