Problematica, the title of George Murray’s strong volume of new and selected poems, refers to species that cannot be scientifically classified. Adam Sol’s instructive and insightful “Introduction” to this collection assists in its classification by highlighting Murray’s forms of mischief, his wit’s flicker and defiant verse. By turns unidentifiable and incisive, Problematica offers a cornucopia of his poems, an intriguing selection from 1995-2020. Perhaps the asterisk at the end of the title stars his centrifugal meanings and misfits; indeed, the asterisk designs that mark this book characterize various clusters of images, forms, and techniques that run through his oeuvre. If his first collection, Carousel, suggests the spin of significance, the poems also address possessives from “The Carnie’s Obituary” to “The Cardiologist’s Arrest.” Opposing forces of clinging to and separation from result in problematica.
Carousel experiments with the sonnet form, probing possessions with eulogies of dispossession. Murray cleverly circles his subject in the first poem, “The Carnie’s Obituary.” A carnie belongs to the carnival (a farewell to flesh), and the carnivalesque mode is central to the poems in this collection. From beginning to end this first sonnet celebrates circles: “Dead in a Ferris wheel crash at forty-three” ends “in a rubber halo.” In between we find balloons, pinwheel lollies, flashing marquee bulbs, bullhorns, and a “Throwing Ring … to circle his head.” In a single sentence deftly punctuated, the poet spins carnivalesque details between centre and circumference, and between the carnie’s body below an overpass and “his way into heaven.” With caustic wit and mordant humour, the poet’s voice contests the carnie’s call. The sonnet sequence in Carousel is filled with a series of death-defying acts, high-wire lowered to the line, three-rings shaped to fourteen lines.
Murray’s propensity for the possessive carries over to his next volume, The Cottage Builder’s Letter, with its titular poem divided into seven sections, as if each one represents a day of the week. Set in Muskoka, 1903, this long poem combines narrative and lyric in a carefully constructed form that reflects the building of a cottage and the writing of a letter back to Ireland. Each stanza begins with “like,” to set a simile that serves as a spike of construction and to compare and share the experience of composition. Each stanza ends with a dash that acts like a peg in the overall structure and serves as a stepping stone between stanzas – a pause for breathing and collecting thoughts. Each section begins with a single italicized line that provides background and introduces the stanzas that follow it: “There are things behind as well” – backgrounds of meaning and the builder’s past that hovers over his present circumstances in Muskoka.
“like nothing he can’t think of telling just yet; he hasn’t written a letter in so long and there’s no telling where it might go – “
These negatives indicate the hardships of telling and building, while the semi-colon works in tandem with end dashes to pause and punctuate rhythms of building a narrative. The second telling opens up the first in a direction of indeterminacy: the destination of the letter across the Atlantic and the actual process of writing across the page in Canada.
The second stanza resumes parallel structures that imitate railway lines: “like the blocked runnel road; the late afternoon sun / behind a line of boxcars stalled north to south / on the track, a row of homes with open doors – .” The semi-colon blocks the runnel road, while the sun “behind” is one of the behind things in the opening line; background and foreground merge and diverge in plans, parallelisms, and the vanishing points of Murray’s poetry. The long o’s open to the next stanza: “like autumn; it was summer when he left, / and he touches a last dazed yellowjacket drunk / on the chill, its sting fallen into his ink pot –.” The semi-colon guides the seasons, while the short i’s indicate a drop of writing ink. The penultimate stanza in each section diverges from the “like” structures and is instead placed in parentheses: “(There has never been a moon so thin; / such an abundance of everything to build on / but this.)” Parenthesis replaces dash before the return to the final stanza; a thin abundance encapsulates the fragility of lyrical grace and the plenitude of a life’s narrative in lambent and plangent tones.
The first section ends “like a knock on the door whose frame isn’t built, / a hand on the knob that is only a thought, / a folding knife or a pen opened in a shallow pocket.” Knock, knot, and knife cluster around sound and the connection between a body’s frame and a cottage’s frame. His pen knife folds and opens, carves wood and stone, words and buildings behind buildings. The narrative continues in couplets in the second section, filling in details of background in Belfast and the obstacles to writing “like the hope that sometime before the wood arrives / there will come to him words that will not defy pen –.” Between the incantatory “like” and the end dash, words and wood interchange like pens, nails, and ink that soaks the design. The third section expands and recapitulates:
“(would that he were a painter or some other skilled in light and were able to tell each item for what it was; yesterday, ten words pooled in his head but hunger and the night drove them off unpenned)”.
Indeed, one could read and reread the entire poem by focussing on each section’s introductory “italics” and penultimate parenthetic lyrics that probe the builder’s pulse. Between those frames, lyric and narrative unfold.
Section VI begins “Between the hammer and the nail there is air” – the air of work, landscape, and sound: “the stony sound of water or the watery sound of stone –.” That choice and chiasmus make it to the final line in the poem after silence, air, and axes: “hit the stone ringing, or the first axes hit the ringing stone.” The cottage builds in incremental ink.
The axe rears its blade again in “Hunter” in Murray’s next collection: “The forest lies quiet immediately before the axe, / the desert gives up accelerating the wind.” Like his builder, Murray’s hunter is gnomic, biblical, and Kafkaesque quiet: “Let us return to the roots of our earliest prophecies.” The hunter is defined by “It is he” clauses in the couplets of the poem, and by his own speech patterns. By the end of the poem the desert develops in the Promised Land that “is still just over the horizon.” The hunter’s horizon “is what you see when you look up.” It is the zone of meaning at the end of a poem, the line established within and between couplets.
“Rush” appears in his next collection, The Rush to Here. The poem is a sonnet with the sound of a monosyllable and surprises in meaning and rhythm. Opening dactyls measure time and anatomy: “Spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch; / if only the body could catch up with the blood.” Syncopation of internal rhyme and alliteration create a temporal rush measured against heartbeat and blood pressure. Systole and diastole recur in the final line of the first stanza: “I’m always chasing this heart’s last rapid tick.” Short a’s and i’s pulse and congeal with their trapping consonants. Instead of the more traditional sonnet form of three quatrains, Murray employs four tercets, but he has other surprises up his sleeve when he settles down “to make some kin.” In the rush of creation and procreation “the quarrel meets the apple,” wings lift shoes, and a boat rows in the clouds. The sonnet’s final couplet offers another startling moment: “Know what I forgot in the rush to here? Blood / isn’t just inside me, it is me, brother.” Murray’s bloodlines course through form and give rise to problematica.
“Whiteout” addresses the blank page against a backdrop of a snowstorm. Murray’s tropes of road, book, lines, turns, and leaf cover page and landscape. The snow instructs the driver to pull the car over, turn the engine off, and draw aside. The personified snow declares “I am life / without known rules.” Without rules, the snow invites problematica, even as “the road goes on without you.” The defiant distance between signifier and signified comes to a halt at the end of the poem: “here you ease the tension ahead by waiting, / despite the chance of being hit from behind.” Murray’s directions, timing, and collisions are always surprising.
Whiteout returns in Invisible Ink in “The Architect” and in “The whiteout slid in sideways” (another drawing aside) at the beginning of “New Refugees Wait at the Lights to Cross Kenmount Road in a Blizzard.” “The Architect” is a single nesting sentence divided by one semi-colon and a series of commas that dance through the lines. The poem compares an architect to a bird, or more accurately a bird to an architect. It is a process of consideration that begins with alliterated monosyllables: “Think this through:” and launches into comparison after the colon: “every bird / is an architect, / her invisible pen / circumscribing space.” The poet is both bird and architect, taking flight and composing lines with an invisible ink pen. The she-bird muse continues “outlining / through-lines,” a blueprint for an edifice in air. Hyphenated through-lines are soon picked up in her “engineer’s-eye over each possible / schematic on the blank space of air.” Bird, architect, and poet continue to make their mark until the semi-colon after air. Their darting rhythms continue: “her quick drive to bank and dive, / roll and glide.” Internal rhymes and imitative harmony accompany the thinking through “drawing isometric / floor plans against the blue.” Murray calibrates through repetitions of every, air, space, and each, which offer inklings to the trace of meanings. The poem concludes with moves towards iambic tetrameter and pentameter to regulate the flight: “by every swing of door acting / as entrance to, and egress from, the sky.” The conceit is complete with the hinge of door swaying between narrative and lyrical modes.
The last poem in Invisible Ink, “Death of the Devout Christian’s Husband,” returns to the possessive mode with rhyming triplets and a witty single line conclusion. (The possessive apostrophe throughout Murray’s poetry signifies a joining and splitting of persona and fate – problematica enhanced by asterisks.) Murray’s wry sensibility appears in the first poem of Problematica, “Just Enjoy the Party, She Said.” The poem contains a series of questions as the poet tries to find his place: “How did I even get here? / Everyone is too close. But to what?” With all of these questions the reader enters the realm of the unidentifiable along with the speaker. “Gutter” takes the reader into a city’s sewer and ends wittily: “Another abyss, into which we spit, / Except when sipping from it.” “Things Cut in Half” runs through lists in two stanzas, the first ending with “Half an hour / can’t be whole with both half / and hour right there in the name.” The second half of the poem ends with “trying to remember how to be whole.” The two stanzas mirror the split between half and whole.
“Late Storm” plays a cat-and-mouse game until the end: “palimpsests rewritten, healed, / waiting to mark where you are.” Palimpsests allude to precursors in the storm of belatedness; rewriting on the wall is another marker of identity. “White” resumes the quest for originality in its lists of whiteness and the sole parenthesis “(minus the black ink.)”
An asterisk that usually directs the reader to the bottom of a page becomes more complicated in this book’s design and Murray’s metaphoric mind. “Pareidolia” gives a sense of this complexity. Although the poem begins with a description of a fairly routine domestic squabble, it soon expands. The first stanza sets a mundane stage: “The couple in the basement argue in the space / they’ve rented and we can hear every word: / shouted, spoken, or hissed through bitten lips.” Space becomes fraught, and by the third line the argument becomes shriller in its various onomatopoeic tones. The second stanza turns from an auditory overhearing to a visual spread where passions are mathematically patterned: “From the patterns of paisleys on the wallpaper / faces emerge, grotesque little Mandelbrots / that once viewed cannot be unseen.” The rhythm captures the argument, as those mathematical Mandelbrot sets spread through the strife, fractals imitating the fractious behaviour of neighbours.
From the basement the poet rises above the dwelling to “Constellations break into asterisms,” starred patterns in “Pareidolia” and Problematica that indicate the trajectory of Murray’s thought. The final stanza turns to the people upstairs who place the poet in a vulnerable and intermediate state between hostility and serenity. “Makes me wonder what the people upstairs / think of these silent evenings at our desks, / and if those below hear aught from those below them.” That casual, down-to-earth voice ends with a fractal hearing of subterranean layers. Murray’s human comedy ascends and descends, spreading asterisms at every stage; his final “aught” is fraught, as domestic disputes spill beyond ordinary boundaries. His asterisks descend to the bottom of the page for thinking things through, even as they levitate beyond basements. In “The Perseids” we find “his asterism / behind the truth falling earthward.”
Part Kafkaesque, part Beckett-like, Murray’s works are about waiting. His final poem in this collection, “Places, Everyone,” finds him “waiting on a ticket.” His waiting game displaces space and defers time in a spatial-temporal conundrum that is compelling and carnivalesque. “It is late, and you are always late / arriving,” after the aphoristic calls of Kafka and Beckett on their carousels: “and the bell has rung / and the lobby lights are flashing.” Murray’s curtain call recapitulates “It was a mad rush getting here,” for the rush alters a carousel’s chronology, while “here” is elsewhere as well. To “track the shapes of those ahead” he creates his own patterns of problematica. In his tale telling he ensures that “there will be no intermission,” yet he knows precisely where to pause and where to rush.
The penultimate poem, “You Can’t Say Anything Anymore,” also recapitulates earlier thoughts and images. “The laundry is sitting on the line –,” the opening line of the poem and horizontal end dash. “Now it’s everyone’s problem” expands to the problematica of other poems. The second stanza explores the problem as it shifts from the visual towards more abstract thought. “Silence shapes decision, / and decision the order of things.” This precision and decision have appeared in an earlier poem, “Storm Door,” which also makes the ordinary remarkable: “What looks like disorder / almost always had its own order, the only rules are: no rules.” The poet’s asterism avoids disaster through consideration, the careful shaping of lines and stanzas in the carnie’s craft. If the laundry airing on the line appears expansive, the “sheets clipped tight / to the line” is more restrictive. Murray meddles with contraction and expansion in formal and informal ways. His knowledge is shared between personae and objects perceived through a bright lens. Symbolic “stains themselves know” through the senses “and know nothing.” His deadpan last lines undercut the order of anything.
“The Verge” epitomizes Murray’s problematica through a whirligig’s repetition – a circular carousel with exits, entrances, and defiant spin of centrifuge and punctuated asterism:
“Everywhere, the verge; just before or after everywhere as well. Green edge, black edge; merge. Moments moments before becoming seconds, but already split seconds before the surge.”
Murray cleaves space and time, juggles the problematic parts, and thinks things through vertiginous verse.
Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English at the Université de Sherbrooke. He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.
- Michael Greensteinhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/michael-greenstein/
- Michael Greensteinhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/michael-greenstein/
- Michael Greensteinhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/michael-greenstein/
- Michael Greensteinhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/michael-greenstein/
- Michael Greensteinhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/michael-greenstein/
- Michael Greensteinhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/michael-greenstein/
George Murray is the award-winning author of eight books of poems and aphorisms as well as a book for children. His poems have appeared in magazines and journals around the world. He grew up in rural Ontario and has spent time abroad in Italy, Mexico, and New York City but now calls St. John’s, Newfoundland, his home.
- Publisher : ECW Press (Sept. 7 2021)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 216 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1770415335
- ISBN-13 : 978-1770415331
