Description
The poems in Her Red Songs are visceral testimonies to the natural world, a world that Murray makes tangible and tactile through her intrinsic gift for accuracy and precision. In these remarkable poems the human is decentred in favour of a voice that strives ‘to be in the world, to be of the
world’; to be part of the thing and not the thing itself – a rare quality in contemporary poetry. Murray is a poet who knows the cost and weight of language, who recognises its ‘constriction’ and its ‘leakage’; a poet who sees parallel possibilities in the world outside our door and
the world outside ourselves, where the city is a ‘freize’ and the ‘speech of trees/ sway.’ To read Her Red Songs is to be subsumed into the beautiful and lightly worn intricacy of Murray’s ‘complex architecture’ of sound, sense, pattern, repetition, and characteristically distilled observation. Her Red Songs is yet another confirmation that Murray is one of the most innovative and technically accomplished Irish poets writing today. Leeanne Quinn
Chris Murray is one of the most original poets in Ireland. Her poems invite us into the natural world, a place that is fragile and wounded, yet transformed in Murray’s hands into a place of wonder and regeneration. ‘All traumas gather in to a tone, /overlaid with fields of blossoming flowers.’ Through delicate imagery, jewelled colours, the naming of plants and birds, Murray observes the passing of time, an absent “you”. Beneath a sense of sadness, as beneath the soil, she finds solace and a structure to the world that is worth celebrating. Anamaría Crowe Serrano
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