Sostenuto

"Throughout my life I have looked toward language for elevation
and 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