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Slim volumes of verse are sometimes just that – lightweight, often tentative gropings in search of an identity or voice. John Murray’s second book of poetry – Last Warming of the Heart (UK: Pen Press Publishers) – is another thing: here is a book that is a pleasure to hold and peruse, robustly bound and delightfully designed. But more importantly, as poetry, it is the real thing. This was a volume I just couldn’t put down as I flicked from one piece to another like so many nuggets I was impatient to gather only to find myself going back, delving deeper, scrutinising, jubilating, jealously relishing the art, the magic, the generosity of it all.
Yet Murray, who has now made his home Seillans, came late to poetry. Born in Wallasey, educated by the Christian Brothers (“nothing very poetic about them,” he says), he shrugged off an early vocation to the priesthood to study engineering at Liverpool before launching into industry and consultancy. His Catholic background left him with a love for liturgy, his language redolent of the concision and mellifluousness of Latin. And then his skilled use of concise metaphor and narrative description suggests that he came in contact at some time with John Donne and the English Metaphysical Poets. However, his verse is undoubtedly the better and more personal for having escaped the academic mill.
Murray has a freshness and directness which stir and surprise at every line. His themes are mainly the passing of time and memory but seen through vividly rendered snippets of experience, of glimpses exquisitely reconstructed from “the deep dark core of memory”, sensitive vignettes of friendships formed, women viewed or wooed, of reflections on passing youth and encroaching age. But there is little in the way of maudlin nostalgia. There is a no-holds barred honesty and lucidity, the wisdom of age, if you wish. The verse pulsates with surges of contained compassion. His rendering of the distracted mind in Alzheimer’s, for instance, is masterly, the narrative and devolvement heart-rendering. If you’re searching for a gift for anyone even mildly interested in poetry, look no further. It’s gratifying to know that the Var has found a voice and an English one at that.
From Riviera Reporter Issue 131: Feb/March 2009
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