One of my favourite poets working in the English language today, when she asked me to launch her latest book published by Turas Press last year, I jumped at the opportunity. Here is what I said on the night in the Irish Writer's Center, Dublin.
bind
– by Christine Murray
An Introduction
Turas Press, Dublin, 2018
Writing is a system of
belief – scripture! People often tend to overlook this simple fact. And, its
most fervent practitioners, like so many other believers, live with it every
day. This belief system of theirs is their way of trying to make a way in the world.
Somehow, through their script, their inscriptions made, on whatever material is
at hand, a formal trace of their lives will remain perhaps long after their
physical remains are gone. This alone, no doubt, is one of the most fundamental
reasons perhaps why writers, and particularly poets, do what it is they do, in
order to, and in the words of one of the system’s most powerful and so
representative voices; leave a stain.
I was up in Kilmainham
recently, walking among the graves in the smaller graveyard there opposite
Bully’s Acre, trying to decipher whatever was left of the inscriptions that
were made on the now great and blackened slabs of stone, and I thought of
Chris. For Christine Murray is a stone-cutter by trade. One day she told me the
most extraordinary thing. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing a living writer,
or poet, has ever told me. She told me that as a stone-cutter you were used to
inscribing letters and words on monuments, and in many cases to the dead. So,
she told me that in her writing, this was a quality that she tried to bring to
her work – this ‘monumental’ vision.
Imagine the time and
effort that is required to first prepare the stone to receive the first chip of
the chisel?
a granite stylus
a grave bed
green sea-bed of flowering heads.
shatter of tree hacked-through/
windmills beside an sruthán geal
gold coins
in – stream- glitter out to me[1]
Symphonic tonal
variations on paper-stone/ Variations of symphonic tones on stone paper.
Whatever way you will attempt to define them, this is what I love about the
poetry of Christine Murray, it is her artful delight and the playfulness in
which she chips away at the words, the way she lets them bleed into one another
like perhaps the vein lines in a stone. Writing being a very physical act for
her. For instance, her very deliberate choice of verbs or nouns(?) There is a
very specific lexicon to Murray’s work. Listen!
silica caul rivulet
and skein
( nouns )
ribbon
sear quill and embed ( verbs )
They are taken from the
worlds of masonry and haberdashery, just two of which Murray effortlessly
channels into her work. One overtly masculine, the other so decidedly feminine,
but such binary concepts have no place in Murray’s universe, for Murray writing
is an act of transgression; all borders must come down. Transgendered, be
aware! With such words, Murray carves out constellations of sound, out from the
graphemes lying there so apparently idle on the page hooking them up to stories,
myth, legend, the stuff of folk-lore and sheer fantasy. Indeed, the worlds she
creates in her books interconnect, which for the reader of her work is but a
further reason to enjoy reading her books. For example, in this her latest bind , the first of her books to be
published in her native country (and for this Liz McSkeane at Turas Press is
heartily to be congratulated) all too familiar motifs such as birds, trees and
leaves appear, as indeed they did in She ( Oneiros Books, UK, 2014), and Cycles ( Lapwing, Belfast, 2013).
But let us first go to
the title – bind , of this her latest
work with its rather curious subsidiary title a waking book. What does this mean? Do other books sleep, and so
dream? If one turns the page we come across the following quote, taken from one
of the poems towards the end of the collection.
a leaf fallen
is always a poem
It signals autumnal
decay, and reverie. In French, curiously, rever
is the verb to dream while réveil is
to awaken, so with just the slightest nuance in pronunciation we are in
completely alternative states of consciousness. Feathers, birds, trees and
leaves are some of the key signs Murray
peoples the psychic horizon, rather like the way signs do people the psychic
world of the iconic French psychoanalytical thinker Jacques Lacan. So, the
world of the subconscious very much being a deep well which Murray exploits at
will. This is one of the key features which make her work so original, I
believe, for she is one of the few contemporary poets in the English- speaking
world, at least, who uses the symbolic power of words so advantageously,
creating these astonishingly clear dreamscapes which we, the readers, are lucky
enough to be able to inhabit in our reading/waking state.
When Chris told me that
the new title of her latest book was bind,
I remember smiling. Was it the verb or the noun, I thought? And this is the
second feature to her work which I believe it is important to further
highlight. As Murray has a deeply physical relationship to language. For like
all truly great poets her understanding does not only encompass a deeply
metaphoric resonance, which is crucial, but her deep appreciation of symbolism
is also allied to her very clear understanding of the onomatopoeia of all
language. This double distinction, coupled with her multifaceted interests in
phenomenon at large in the world, give Murray’s work a particular edge over a
lot of writing which is produced today.
Christine told me in an
email, and I will quote her directly, “ It is elegiac.” It meaning bind. “It is about not being limited by
physicality but being bound by our inability to transcend certain rules – hence
the double-bind. The Gordian knot.”
if there are birds here.
they are made of stone. [2]
Before passing you over
to Christine herself, there are just three extracts from some of the poems that
I wish to highlight here, to give you a little flavour of the miracle which she
brings. The first is a rather playful paraphrasing of the all too familiar
dictum of Heraclitus about never being able to step into the same river twice,
due to the eternal flux of material things-Life. In the first poem cycle of the
book, in which the main ideas are introduced, the poem narcissus figures. It is
at once a nod to the classic figure of Greek mythology, complete with echo contemplating him in the wings,
evoking all of the psychic resonance of the archetypal pair, while at the same
time being just a wonderful tonal composition evoking nature’s splendour.
Generosity is another hallmark of great art, and it is by such twin-fold bounty
that Murray’s generosity comes.
not step twice into, not
step back from stream.
its nets are storm-blackened,
Nets figure again and
again in bind - appearing in the very first title poem ‘ her
nets of dust, fire’ in relation to the wonderfully phrased ‘draughts of birds’ to
the ‘chlorophyll nets’ which ‘patch the grass’ in the closing poem of the first
cycle. Along with the ‘corridors’ which also figure, a whole poem being given
over to them, the nets act as an architextural devices to further consolidate
the overall theme of bondage which the book treats, of human bondage to quote
Somerset Maugham. And, yes, there are strong sado-masochistic undertones
seeping through the text, yet another layer Murray, the book’s Architext
inserts; no doubt too out of sheer mischief. For Christine Murray belongs to a
longstanding tradition of Gothic writers, and such is where bind, just like She and The Blind (
Oneiros Books, UK, 2013) before it, needs to be placed, alongside
the poetry of Sylvia Plath and Marianne Moore, in the modernist tradition, but
also alongside Emily Dickinson, Karen Blixen and Mary Shelley.
it is voice brings us alive
So Murray reminds us in
the poem stalk the open ring, again
a poem taken from the first poem cycle in the collection, and again relating to
the figure of Narcissus. In Lacan’s universe, the mirror stage is a pivotal
moment in the child’s engagement with the world around them, as it is the first
time they fully perceive visually that they are a body in the world which they
perceive for the first time, like Narcissus in the Greek myth. It is a
traumatic experience, according to Lacan, or at least it can be depending how
the child handles the vision of themselves in the world. Murray seems to be
evoking this Lacanian world yet very much with her own slant, the voice too
entering consciousness to either startle the Other into wakefulness in order to
‘dream’ together, or Not!
it is an unearthing of voice,
brings us alive.
his hands bound by feathers, his
red wings, a difficult birthing.
the gash
female-d.
mauve,
her silks are.
her integuments retain,
prevent his voice from out-birthing.
Not, it would appear
being very much the case, hence the elegiac register. But, to invoke Heraclitus
and Lacan once again, is not such stifling, such repression, not the true
Mid-Wife of all Art? Such conflict being the mother of all unique invention?
Finally,
bound to
& bound
in. is
the very
point
of
tissue(d) skin.
For a poet so obsessive
of form such matter does not pass unnoticed, being bound, all puns intended, to
both the physical and mental content. Acceptance being key; freedom is a cage.
Embrace the bars! Murray seems to be telling.
it is dawn
In Beckettian
parenthesis…
the nodding daisies mourn.
Peter O’Neill
Irish Writer’s Centre
8/10/2018
https://turaspress.ie/events/
See also Poethead, Christine's wonderful blog.
https://poethead.wordpress.com/
[2] Taken from bind - opening poem.
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