Boris Weds: a poem by Nicholas Murray

 

City Lights: a new poetry collection from Melos

My latest poetry collection City Lights published by the Melos Press is now out.  This wide-ranging and versatile 32-page pamphlet collection contains the longer sequences “The Song of Rhodri” (the voice of an imaginary medieval Welsh bard) and “The World Tree” (poems about trees in myth and reality drawing on Norse legend) as well as poems of contemporary political resonance. From the Welsh countryside to Washington DC and all points in between these poems are both lyrical and engaged.

My recent collections, A Quartet in Winter and The Yellow Wheelbarrow can also be ordered here.

St Valentine’s Day approaches

 

This month’s Reader’s Recommendation from Seren Books. 20 years old and still available for 14th February.  “This mult-faceted jewel is a reader’s delight,” said The Independent on publication.

The latest issue of Scintilla, the annual journal of the Vaughan Association has just appeared and once again it has a wide selection of contemporary poetry as well as articles related to its area of interest. I have three poems in this issue.

Manchester Review praises The Yellow Wheelbarrow

The latest Manchester Review includes a review of The Yellow Wheelbarrow by Ian Pople:

Nicholas Murray has also shown himself to be a fine satirist, as his poem A Dog’s Brexit, showed so well. The Yellow Wheelbarrow is a full-length collection of work and includes work from previous pamphlets as well as new work. Murray the satirist is represented here with such poems as ‘We Must Avoid Cliché’, which, as you might imagine, does not avoid cliché, particularly where the ‘poe-biz’ is concerned.

"This long awaited first collection./Long-touted on Twitter by its friends,/its enemies not yet found, still to stir/from their long sleep of indifference."

What is present even in these lines whose purpose is, perhaps, ‘political’ with a small ‘p’, is the quiet rhythmic pulse with underpins all Murray’s poems.

That assured rhythmic control is often allied with a closely observational sense in Murray’s writing. And the final effect of this combination is a warm lyrical quality to these texts. The poem, ‘Venus’ depicts the painting of a nude by Cranach the Elder in the painter’s studio, in the dead of winter, ‘where ice made dragons // on the window-pane / and lust froze up before the twist / of water left the opened tap.’ Murray’s deft imagination creates the strikingly visual image of the ice making ‘dragons’ on the window. Then he yokes the freezing of lust with the unfrozen water in the tap; and does so, in part, with that nice half-rhyme of ‘lust’ and ‘twist’.

Perhaps Murray’s satire is a natural development of that other ability his poetry has, an ability to look at a scene and depict it with real emotional precision. In that way, Murray’s lyrics share the laser like focus of his satire. The emotional precision of Murray’s poems drive the quiet narrative that leads the poems. And in that precision there is a feeling of what might be right entwined with what might be possible, as in the poem ‘Island’, which is here quoted in full:

Brendan’s monks have lit a fire

where gutted fish brown on whittled sticks,

and God is thanked for the air of a small island.

There is no hint of what’s to come:

the slide of embers, the tilt and scatter

when the whale lifts itself from seeming sleep.

The Yellow Wheelbarrow

My new collection of poems from Melos was published on 4th November and launched in London on 3rd December 2019. It is available from Melos post free or you can obtain a copy here (see drop down menu to the right).

The title alludes to “The Red Wheelbarrow”, the famous poem by the modernist American poet William Carlos Williams.







Some Critical Opinion:-

"'The Migrant Ship' and 'Calais' seem to be masterpieces of metaphor for our ghastly times.”
                Paul Binding

"A remarkable collection, in that Murray’s talent for the nuances of rhyme works effortlessly into his political satire, and some truly moving poems of love.”
              John Powell Ward

"A fine and remarkably varied book.”
              Anthony Rudolf

"The collection riveted me from the very first poem.”
              Ruth O’Callaghan

Who Was the Better Prophet? Huxley or Orwell?

PRESTEIGNE FESTIVAL 2019

presteignefestival.com/site/events/

Event 6

Friday 23 August at 4.00pm 

Assembly Rooms, Presteigne LD8 2AD

Dydd Gwener 23 Awst am 4.00pm

Yr Ystafelloedd Cynnull, Llanandras LD8 2AD

Huxley or Orwell? The Battle of the Books

Literature with Nicholas Murray

Nicholas Murray, biographer of Aldous Huxley, looks at the competing claims of the two great twentieth century dystopian novels, Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Which predicted more accurately the way the world was heading in their time and ours? Was Huxley’s book, predicting a consolidation of ’soft power’ in Western consumer societies more accurate in the world of Facebook and Google than Huxley’s darker vision symbolised by the famous image of the jackboot on the face?

Tickets £7.50 unreserved 

Tocynnau £7.50 heb eu cadw 

Event ends at approximately 5.15pm

Bydd y digwyddiad bwn yn gorffen am tua 5.15pm