Elsewhere: The Collected Poems of Nicholas Murray

 

I am pleased to announce the publication of my Collected Poems, drawing together all my work to date. It is available from Melos Press where it can be ordered post-free or from here. It is called Elsewhere: Collected Poems of Nicholas Murray after one of the poems in that collection which talks of the contemplation of a painting taking us to “an exalted elsewhere”. This, it seems to me, is what the poetic imagination does: enhances reality (not encouraging us to ‘escape’ from it) transforming and sharpening perception. This is why the arts in general and literature in particular are so essential to human life. Without them we are denuded, less than complete.

Many of the poems are political, sometimes very unambiguously so in the vigorous political satires but sometimes much more obliquely, even invisibly so. And many of the poems are not the least bit political. I hope this makes for diversity and variety and I hope you enjoy the collection.

Here is what the publisher’s blurb says:-

Nicholas Murray’s many books include poetry, two novels, critically acclaimed biographies of Franz Kafka, Aldous Huxley, Bruce Chatwin, Andrew Marvell, and Matthew Arnold, and studies of Liverpool, Bloomsbury and British poets of the First World War. He is a Fellow of the Welsh Academy and, with his wife Sue, runs the prize-winning poetry imprint, Rack Press.

      Nicholas Murray’s poems deal with love and art, humanity, politics, and the natural world in a body of work marked by both passion and fine craftsmanship. David Harsent has written that Murray has ‘a sure hand, whether with hard-edged satire...or sense impressions that produce place and event so vividly’

Praise for earlier collections of poems:

Of earth, water, air and fire ‘A real treat…an elemental menagerie in which the poet’s own delight through verbal magic becomes ours’. Christopher Reid

Get Real  ‘A bravura display of finely controlled outrage.’ Times Literary Supplement

The Museum of Truth  ‘A stunning collection.’ Martina Evans

City Lights  ‘The poems have an emotional intelligence, a wit, that I really admire.’ Michèle Roberts