Reviews
Jackknife
& Light
by Michelle Murphy
"When one slips into the tangled dream of Michelle Murphy's prose poetry,
one may not wish to awaken. Expressly concerned with relationships, landscape
and time, Jackknife & Light, Murphy's first book, bursts with intensity.
. .by colliding and deconstructing time, Murphy designs a new time where
past, present and future merge. . .a great debut." — Rain Taxi
Mouthed, Michelle Murphy's poems are mouthed onto the page. They're wet with the pears, apples, mangoes of an indeterminate landscape, part myth, part memory, "smoke on everything." The great tenderness of her sensibility! In Jackknife & Light's insistently meditative prose poems, where past and present overturn each other, and narrative skin is peeled into fragments and run-ons, Murphy brightlines human intimacies-between lovers, parents and children, the dead and the surviving-with a remarkable formal inventiveness. "If I had just one story," she writes, "I'd rather starve than have to live by it." Fortunately, she has enough imagination, strangeness, and verve to nourish us all. --Forrest Gander
In Michelle Murphy's poems, the breathtaking underlies the breath of utterance: a "jackknife" has incisively separated the speech-membrane to reveal its store of "light."
Her lyricism allows the parallel lines of life & language to meet at a surprisingly intimate distance: "The original shape of our future is a wilderness we never outgrow."
This writing is possessed of an immediacy, an urgency that is only intensified by its precariously balanced formal elegance: here, the moment of experience is made to tremble on the lip of a sudden transformation.
Michelle Murphy's lucid chord-clusters ("mornings of straight edged white sky, the strict angles of a harpsichord") are instilled with the hush of ardor: a passion caught in the act of knowing itself. --Andrew Joron
"Tread carefully here," Michelle Murphy warns us, for "all is not exactly what it seems." Murphy's primary subject in this, her brilliant first book, is the beauty that becomes delicate "when suddenly & endlessly gone." Yet her poems, through their graceful confusions of secular and spiritual languages, are prayers that would take "our legacy of doubt" and somehow "make faith durable." Murphy provides us with "a method of looking" and listening that is intensely subjective and attuned to silence, as well as to the vagaries of a language that can "grow more feral than imagined." Her finales of seem describe a lost yet sayable past, and promise "the original shape of our future . . . a wilderness we never outgrow." -Susan Schultz
Michelle Murphy's writing carries its own weight. Hers is an astute, penetrating voice that jars a reader out of the ordinary through surprise and fearlessness. When you least expect it, you'll be dragged away to be devoured by beauty and intelligence. Such is the life of real poetry-its scale determined by the genuine. "We resemble where we've been," she writes, then allows the exception that perhaps that's not always true, but in the case of Jackknife & Light it always is. --George Evans