Chez Robert Giron

Gival Press is pleased to announce the release of Voyeur, winner of the Gival Press Poetry Award, by Rich Murphy of Marblehead, Massachusetts.



(Artwork by Mark Johnson)





“Mr. Murphy is a very careful craftsman in his work, a patient and testing intelligence, one of those writers who knows precisely what he wants his style to achieve. His poetry is quiet but packed, carefully wrought, not surrealistically wild, and its range not limited but deliberately narrow. It takes aim.”
—Derek Walcott

“In Voyeur, Rich Murphy earnestly explores the complicated nature and innate integrity of the ‘wild’ -or even divine- feminine as subject to chance, circumstance, and interaction with the masculine. In some sense, a pervasive longing at once subtle and tense, for a ‘natural life,’ defines this collection of poems. Murphy’s Voyeur, while never revealing the *I*, bares a sensitive and often perplexed masculine narrator. But this bemusement, and a masculine struggle to fathom the feminine, is essential to the manuscript; it is the elemental brightening force of this aptly titled collection – a vision to previously veiled poetic spaces. While Murphy’s poems are most often set in a contemporary world of suburban gyms and kitchen tables, they nonetheless draw from aspects of Greek mythology, recalling the Homeric king Odysseus and sorceress Circe; however, as in the centuries-old tract established by the poet Sappho, Murphy’s paramount focus rests not on stories of gods and heroes but rather in the quiet sublime of the turning of hours in a life at once familiar and heterodox.”
—Ginger Knowlton

“In Rich Murphy’s exciting and sexy collection Voyeur ‘men / and women fall in love with their minor / economies and haggle over appearances / and favors.’ Murphy reveals to us that ‘I pan from coast to coast / and bedrooms frame acts of the American / Dream in abandon.’ Like family, Voyeur is complex yet accessible, and Murphy’s powerful use of metaphor will intrigue you, ‘Husbands and wives fill houses/ with doodads and two strangers.’ But also ‘father’s fetishes, mother’s moods, / and aunt’s angst, are wrapped in love.’ Voyeur is a reflection of the family seen through the eyes of an extremely gifted poet.”
—Leah Maines, author of Beyond the River and Looking to the East with Western Eyes

“Voyeur is a work of vision and virtuosity. Concerned with relationships, marriage, sex and power, the poetry is dense, rapid, dazzling, the voice commanding, the speaker charismatic…The poems are extraordinary as individuals, from the intriguing declarative first sentence of each down to its decisive, glistening last line. And as a collection, like 'a subtle song [that] travels / from ancient feet through hearts / to first breath in the world,' Voyeur is spectacular."
— Richard Carr, judge and author of Honey



Biography:
Rich Murphy holds degrees from Boston University, including a graduate degree in creative writing. He studied with the late George Starbuck and Derek Walcott. He currently teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University and lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

His credits include a book of poems The Apple in the Monkey Tree (Codhill Press); chapbooks Great Grandfather (Pudding House Publications), Family Secret (Finishing Line Press), and Hunting and Pecking (Ahadada Press); poems in hundreds of journals in Anglophone countries; and essays in such periodicals as The International Journal of the Humanities, Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning, Reconfigurations: A Journal for Poetics Poetry / Literature and Culture, Fringe, and Big Toe Review. His essay on poetry’s evolving ecology will be in a special issue of The Journal of Ecocritism (University of British Columbia). His work has been nominated for several awards.

To contact him directly: murphy.rich@rocketmail.com.

To buy a copy on Amazon.com, click on the link below:
Amazon.com


ISBN 13: 978.1.928589.48.8 / $15.00 pb / 100 pgs
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