PN Review on Joan Murray's Reflective Poems

In PN Review's newest issue, Jena Schmitt reviews Drafts, Fragments, and Poems: The Complete Poetry by Joan Murray, released last year by NYRB Poets and edited by Farnoosh Fathi, "a keen editor who helps to reveal Murray’s intelligence and skill, moving as close to the original poems in the first section as possible, rather than the versions liberally edited by a friend of Murray’s mother, Grant Code, for the original publication of Poems," as Schmitt notes. More:

...(He added punctuation where there was none, for instance, separated combined words, fashioned titleless poems with titles, stanzaless poems into stanzas, not unlike the way Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson edited Emily Dickinson’s poetry for publication in 1890.) The letters in the middle section feel like a wedge between two sections of poetry, letters holding open doors to what as a writer Murray was doing and thinking. Words and phrases, images and ideas gather in the first section, echo throughout the letters, continue to reverberate in the unpublished poems of the third section, capturing moments in Murray’s life, ‘lingering for a moment in the vacuum of a moment’s shadow or a moment’s life’, as she wrote to her friend Helen Anderson. 

In ‘Poem’, Elizabeth Bishop writes, ‘art “copying from life” and life itself, / life and the memory of it so compressed / they’ve turned into each other’. Murray’s unfixed life, her unrootedness, is often reflected in her writing. There is a turbulent energy, a constant searching, wandering, figuring, turning, returning, and the spaces left behind are often felt rather than filled. Not even Murray can find them: ‘I have looked for my childhood among pebbles my home.’ 

Many of her poems talk of the sea, the ocean, trees, fields, mountains; of men, women, mothers, fathers, children; of hands, feet, veins, bones, faces; of cities, buildings, rooms, houses, windows, corridors, doors...

Read on at PN Review.