Minimize Considered by Nina Murray

Reading Nina Murray‘s work is, in some ineffable way, like turning the pages of your own life. It leaves you in greater harmony with the world and more deeply in touch with its infinite possibilities. The keen pangs of recognition are tempered by the quiet, elegiac sadness of acceptance. Beautiful writing, a singular book of poems, rendered in precise, crisp language yet, marvellously, managing to produce a powerful visceral, vivid, heart-bound, near-inarticulable impression.

–Mikhail Iossel, Associate Professor of English/Creative Writing, Concordia University

These poems by Nina Murray draw on her experience as an officer of the U.S. Department of State and to a large degree are set in cities where she has worked or studied.  Whether it be Toronto, Washington, D.C., or Lincoln, Nebraska, the poems are acutely aware of place; some portray the impersonality of the modern urban landscape. But the poet’s eye often picks out, primarily from nature, sharply observed exceptions to the rule.  For example, in “August,” the collection’s opening poem, she considers the spiders which have adapted to life on the façade of a high-rise building: “anchored in the joint of brushed steel/the height doesn’t bother them/the wind/seventeen floors above the street/fawns over them/feeds small flies into their web/an occasional disoriented wasp/it is a life…’  Similarly, the poem goes on to say, “we inhabit/this city’s crevices…”

The poems can be divided into three distinct categories of subject matter: those dealing with nature, those dealing with aspects of the foreign service, and those somewhat more static pieces that focus on a general theme.  They are written in free verse, the lines at times very wide, occasionally modulating into a sort of loose blank verse, as in this description of Marines tussling with a lowered flag in the wind:

He saw their hands, sharp in the umber light, beating down on the stripes, the silk alive, bucking them off, the billows of it high above their heads…

And in “June,” perhaps the best of the nature poems, the opening line, “a circus of rain,” is elaborated in the two lines at the end: “The pavement— dappled mirror —/returns my gaze as winks.”  The poem’s images are thus enclosed by a complex, developing metaphor—a subtle turn on the tradition of circular form.

These poems—this poet—bear the unmistakable stamp of the real thing.

–Roy Scheele, author of The Sledders