"To Nora, A Singer Of Sad Songs" by Mark A. Murphy (Clare Songbirds Publishing House, 2019)

Poems from Poetry Review, The Warwick Review, and about 40 other magazines! The book begins with "My Love is in America". The first stanza is representative of what's to come -

I cannot hold you, nor yet kiss you, yet with your song you have rendered my heart incapable of hiding in the loneliness of the moon.

The vocabulary's typical of lyricism. Here's a frequency count of some of the book's most common words - love (91), dream[s] (32), song[s] (31), night (29), heart (23), eye[s] (23), life (18), death (18), moon (18), sleep (17), star[s] (17), beyond (12). As the final line of the extract above suggests, the imagery is sometimes complex. Here's the end of "Sunrise"

Somewhere in time the dreamer and the dreamed will fish the river bed for stones, all the colours of sky, making their feelings known – weighing their pockets with love.

The stones that can look so colourful underwater can look bland when dry. Perhaps these lovers are retrieving the stones that Virginia Woolf weighted her pockets down with. I liked the water imagery in "Aesthete" too - "Your eyes are children running wildly in summer rain,/ swimming naked in our lakes and in our rivers" - but there's a limit to how many ways that moon, water, sleep, etc can be strikingly combined: "Infinite Blue" is a step too far for me - "Our moon is a silver chalice/ to drink from/ before we slumber/ sheltered in each other’s arms.".

Typical of lyric poems these pieces illustrate a state of mind rather than a course of action. There's little history, analysis of causes, or planning for the future. Without the tension/resolution pattern, some poems tend to go in circles, most clearly in "Pain Eater" which begins with "What words can be said to save her as she takes the blades to her wrists" and ends with "What words can be said to convince a girl to keep struggling?".

The diction is unfashionably, unashamedly elevated. For example in "Kissing the Moon" there's "Now we enter the fifth month of our separation" rather than "We've been apart 4 months now". I doubt whether contemporary readers could handle too many poems like "Under Stars" with its unironic "I am reminded only of one desire, my desire to share the rest of my days with you." Perhaps aware of this risk (and of tonal uniformity), the poet's injected disjointed language, but at a cost. Here's how "Gaity Among the Newly Wed" ends

Make love to me now, in the attic rooms and living rooms of suburbia, drink it in until your lungs are so full of hope you can no longer keep the world to your self.

"attic rooms and living rooms of suburbia" sounds verbose to me. In "drink it in" what does "it" refer to? Why are lungs singled out to be filled with hope - drowning? Why "your self" rather than "yourself"?

Another risk is self-indulgence, particularly in the selection of the poems - are they sometimes included more for the benefit of the poet than the reader? It's a long book, and I wondered whether it might have been stronger without a few of the poems, interconnected though they are. It's tempting to read each poem in the context of the others, to read them as fact, to seek the key poems that offer a back story. "Confessions" begins with "What can I tell you, dear reader of all my sad prayers? You have read my poems for Nora." Then we're told "no other could enter our union, except God, and so it was with that rarest of ecstasy that we made our life of prayer together. Now she has gone and I am all alone. Dare I tell you of my despair? I no longer feel God's love." Here is the starkest explanation of the book's religious imagery - its prayers and angels.

Several pieces begin with a question - "What song shall you sing"; "Why heap regret upon regret?"; "What can I tell you, dear reader of all my sad prayers?"; "What words can be said to save her"; "What was left before us, my lover"; "How do you expect me to carry your sadness when I can hardly carry my own?"; "What loss brought you to this". Others, more optimistically, start with wishes - "Stay a while longer my timid girl"; "Sleep, my rebel girl"; "Wear your long hair up"; "Sleep, Nora, sleep".

The poems are carefully shaped - 3- or 4-lined stanzas are common, and "At the Grave of Sylvia Plath" has regularly stepped indents, but nearly all the pieces are non-metrical as far as I can tell, though "Now We are Stars" has a loose abba rhyme scheme, at its tightest in this stanza -

Love is beyond what hunted dogs and the mysterious river may partially recall in the never ending flood of lives lived below the bogs.

This is also an example of the hopeful chaining together of phrases that I struggled with. Why are the dogs being hunted? I thought they might be Orion's hunting dogs. Which river? Another allusion to the title's constellation idea, or the Styx? How does a river recall? It might make you forget.

In "Violeta Angelova" I think "the violet with is mix of red and blue light" has a typo.

Other reviews

• Emma Lee (a lyrical look at enforced separation and whether love can survive that separation. However, I’d have liked to know more about Nora. She sings, but I don’t know who her favourite singers or what her favourite songs are. I don’t know how she sang: power ballad or jazz? She haunts this collection, but never quite solidifies into a person. I suspect Mark Murphy’s intention was to focus on and capture the sense of love lost and the collection does successfully recreate the ambiance of a melancholy song that echoes after the book has been shut.)
• Wanda Lea Brayton (The entirety of the poem "Blue November" made me ache with empathy and weep with understanding)