Bøker av Sheila Murphy

"This poem, this act of fragmented writing, isn't located anywhere particular, but within itself. A scrolling well-crafted stream of consciousness. It accumulates and disperses, accumulates and disperses then bifurcates and accumulates further. Surprise. You can juxtapose anything with anything else and find resolution. Word-filled bubbles emerge, rise and pop all around your reading. Sheila's a phrase collagist pushing opposing forces together. A startling diarist. A collector of commentary of the day, of the eyes, of how the real unravels to extra uncommon clarity. This will take you places jarring and jagged, awkwardly familiar like deja vu and unexpectedly new. This book is that." - Nico Vassilakis.

"Throughout my life I have looked toward language for elevationand found that more potent than gravity." - Sheila E. Murphy Murphy's work has been a lifelong journey to find beauty and a kind of transcendence in life, in thought, in experience, and in language while at the same time including all the complexities, difficulties, and darkness from which any transcendence must arise. SOSTENUTO, a sequence of recent sonnets, is certainly no exception, and also has a wonderful angularity and edginess, an edginess embedded in a richness of diction and consciousness. The poems have a voice, a sensibility and a "story" or narrative current which is fully authentic. Part of that authenticity is sensed in the often cut-up (and at times surrealistic) nature of the writing, which is also amazingly smooth and flowing. There are storms, understandings and questionings running through these beautiful poems, which form true mirrors to the depths and heights of living. - John M. Bennett