Escritoire

Description

Sheila E. Murphy

Escritoire

ISBN: 978-1-956921-42-7 (pbk.)

(June 15, 2025, preorder available) 

Reading Escritoire is like hearing intimate, philosophical music that sings from the heart and mind, always intensely noticing the inner and outer worlds. These poems show a deftness and originality with forms and free verse ranging in topic from the quotidian to the cerebral. It is as though she’s always on high alert to hear and capture language that transcends itself and colors experience. Humor reigns supreme as she hears her titles (“Moderator from Modesto”; “Kissed by Key Lime Pie Charts”; “Stilton at the Hilton”). There is a consistently optimistic strain that runs through the work of Sheila E. Murphy. She’s amazed in her gratitude, delicately sending and rendering subtleties of loving interchange among people while recognizing political and social hurdles. There is no one standard issue Sheila Murphy poem. The range and variety are astonishing. Sometimes taut, sometimes sprawling, always focused and discovering. On the spectrum ranging from expectation to surprise, Murphy decidedly leans toward surprise.

Sheila E. Murphy is one innovative poet who dares in much of her work to evince a positive ethos, “the affirmation of the blood.” In Escritoire, we find finely wrought praise-poems like “Making Loving a Design” and “Late-Term Divas,” celebratory nature poems, and poignant elegies like “Now I Lay Me Down to Loss” that sometimes double as love poems. To balance the positive, some of Murphy’s portraits incisively expose the “false wealth” of self-indulgence and disregard of others. This bard, as in her many prior volumes, is a master of word-play, as in “Blaspheme, Lurleen, “Social Medea,” and “desert sprawl versus dessert crawl.” Sometimes, one part of speech morphs into another. For example, the adjective “young” turns into a wild verb. Escritoire also features a generous helping of Murphy’s signature “American haibun,” where linear paraphrase may prove hapless while marvelous verbal imagination bounds and abounds.

Thomas Fink, author of A Pageant for Every Addiction

Sheila Murphy’s poetry enhances the experiences she writes about and doesn’t stop at simply recording them. She reveals how the smallest activities enhance everyday life when conveyed with the inventiveness and wide vocabulary evident in Escritoire. Unanticipated phrases aren’t just present for their music, rather as indicators of how details observed and internalized are never undervalued or forgotten. Writing through the world with her mind in step with her senses, she draws on memory and momentary insight with a style that is smart without ever dropping to the level of mere cleverness.

David Chorlton, author of Dreams the Stones Have

Passion, velocity and intensity, compression, humor, and trust in her readers are qualities you’ll find in the remarkable poems collected in Escritoire. Sheila E. Murphy’s keen intelligence in these amazing and wide-ranging poems is original and fresh. These surprising and vivid poems, many about love and/or grief, are full of stunning, lyrical lines. This is a fantastic book to which a reader will return and reread often.

John Levy, author of 54 Poems Selected and New

The musicality of this new collection by Sheila E. Murphy, Escritoire, continues with such aplomb: she deftly turns landscape into music, where the wind is an indicator of change, clearing the mind, comforting. Moreover, breath, which is an instrument in itself, the dominant motif, the etymology of inspiration. Music evoking reminiscence. There are glimpses into her personal life and the quotidian, love, the soul and the heart, but everything is synthesized into a universal but distinctive poetry that sings in a syntax that Murphy has made her own. Language is woven into the skein of poetry, the interplay between identity, sensuality (skin) and seduction. Nature abounds in these poems, with birds (including doves, robins, ducks, starlings, peacocks, mockingbirds, hummingbirds, woodpeckers and bluebirds), insects (identification with butterflies and bees), flowers, fruit, seeds, trees (their parts, such as their branches and leaves), light, the dawn, the desert, mountains, rain, snow, the sky, the wind, clouds, rainbows, the moon, the sun, rivers, stars; a kind of speech, a response.
Every writer has a writing-desk (escritoire) — here we see Murphy’s continued dedication to poetry, with a number of poems written in a haibun style that she has made her own, paeans and ghazals. She adeptly turns grief and sorrow — life’s sadness — into an “unfinished joy” (“Hospice Nurse”), never plaints but exultations. (Picasso once said that going into the bullfighter’s ring was like going to the bottom of the sea; the bottom of the sea was where Anaïs Nin imagined heaven.) She takes religious language (plainsong) and turns it into the spiritual; she evokes the perfumes of vowels and syllables, the vocabulary of private spaces. She plays with language. Murphy has given us a beautiful gift to be read, aloud or to oneself. Escritoire has to be on every table or desk.

Javant Biarujia, author of Pointcounterpoint: New and Selected Poems