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)
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.
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.
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?
A long while ago, Zach Wells contacted me about using a sonnet from The Rush to Here in his upcoming anthology of Canadian sonnets called Jailbreaks. Well, the anthology has finally up and come. And it’s not only a beautiful looking book, it’s a very interesting rattlebag of poetry more concerned with the poem at hand than the name brand of the poet. There are quite a few well known poets in here, but more than a few are new to me, and most of the sonnets are new to me as well. I’m pleased to be part of it, but moreso to simply have it. Go get it.
Also upcoming is a reprint of a poem from The Cottage Builder’s Letter in Open Wide a Wilderness: Canadian Nature Poems. That one will be out in August.
I’ll be making several appearances in support of the Atlantic Book Awards, in which I’ve been shortlisted for the Atlantic Poetry Prize, starting May 9th and leading up to the award ceremony on the 12th, and then in St. John’s shortly after. If you’re handy to any of these venues, I’d love to see you there. Details below.
May 9th, 7pm
Reading with: Don Domanski, Anne Simpson, and Herménégilde Chiasson
Saint John, NB – University of New Brunswick, Ward Chipman Building, Study Lounge
May 10th, 3:30pm
Reading with Don Domanski
Charlottetown, PE – Confederation Centre Library
May 12th, 4pm
Atlantic Book Awards Ceremony
Dartmouth, NS – Alderney Theatre
May 15th, 7pm
Reading with Marq de Villiers and Bernice Morgan
St. John’s, NL – The Studio, 272 Water Street
My thanks to the Writers Federation of Nova Scotia for organizing and footing the bill for all this travel, and to the Writers Alliance of Newfoundland Labrador for hosting the St. John’s reading.
The Rush to Here has been shorlisted for the Atlantic Poetry Prize along with Don Domanski’s All Our Wonder Unavenged and Anne Simpson’s Quick. I’m very pleased to be in such good company for such a great award.
I’ll be in the Atlantic provinces in May as part of the award tour with readings in St. John, Charlottetown, Halifax, and St. John’s. Details to follow.
As a reminder to whomever might wander in here from down New Jersey way, I will be reading at Princeton this Monday as part of a two event stint at the great Ivy League school. I’m very much looking forward to reading with poet James Richardson, whose is famous in part for his aphorisms—a fortuitous choice of reading partner because quite a number of readers have mentioned that the aphorism-like couplets that act as unifiers for the octave- and sestet-like elements of many of the sonnets in my new book have been among their favourite aspects of the work.
Monday, March 3, 7:30
Trinity Church, Princeton
with James Richardson
(public reading)
Tuesday, March 4, 4:30pm
209 Scheide Caldwell House, Princeton
(students and faculty only)
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, 2007This 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.
I’ll be reading twice at Princeton in March, as both a guest of the Canadian Studies Department and Trinity Church. I’ll update the details below as they become available. The first reading will have local poets attached, and I’m excited to see who they might be. If you’re in the area and can make it, please stop by.
Monday, March 3, 7:30
Trinity Church, Princeton
with James Richardson
(public reading)
Tuesday, March 4, 4:30pm
209 Scheide Caldwell House, Princeton
(students and faculty only)
I’ll take an extra day ahead to visit some friends in my old NYC stomping grounds.
