I prefer rose's honesty
Each flower opens its face
to the sun,
doing violence to the dark
places beneath–
Each course in its bloom,
a moon lighting everything
‘till new–
A yellow star has fallen–
captured, placed
in these pages.
Her fragile heart,
papery-thin,
her two-month bloom,
my accompaniment– in this, this.
Their honest flames
dance scarlet
along the edges,
wildly in-lit.
© Chris Murray (2024)
from the book Her Red Songs.
If we start with the title, we must always start with the title, these are songs! The poet would seem to be reminding us of the very intimate connection between poetry and song, which I would say has largely been lost when one considers the amount of prose, as opposed to prosody, which has slipped into contemporary “poetry” these days. The irony being that while I write this, I am finishing an almost year long study into the prosody of the seldom read French novelist Louis Ferdinand Céline whose poetic lineage goes back to chanson de geste and Le Roman de la Rose of Frech medieval poetry and which was to have such a profound influence on not only western literature but on western notions of chivalry and what we understand in a modern sense as romantic ‘Love’ today!
Read the review here.
So, the above title belongs to a subscription-only article based on an essay about the unavoidable mentioning of my whole cardiac debacle in the context of Her Red Songs (my new book). I am not mad about talking about it, to the extent that a few people knew anything at all, it seems. However, these things impact our creative lives, and they leave their mark not alone on the body, but on the book. It has left its mark on my book, from title change, dedication, the creation of the index to the final poems chosen. That is why I wrote the essay, it is unavoidable.
The fact of it is that the book changed a lot from the time of its acceptance and contract in 2022 to the one published in 2024 and the reasons for these changes are written here, https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/2024/03/15/how-rewriting-my-poetry-collection-after-a-heart-attack-helped-my-recovery/?fbclid=IwAR2HckheRJSBGUW_6UVQ_-NJCj2DoJunBkqCAHFf0HeJBQ0FyC_-XC3_DEM (Irish Times, books)
If you can’t access the above subscription article, I put an earlier version of the above essay in my Internet Archive account here, https://archive.org/details/on-her-red-songs
And for those people who like things that cannot be found elsewhere, there are three well-read electronic chapbooks at a similar address here,
Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/@christine-elizabeth
Her Red Songs release date 21/02/2024.
Her Red Songs is the most recent collection from one of Ireland’s most innovative and daring poets. Chris Murray’s remarkable body of work is a profound expression of connectedness with the environment, her poems evoking a delicate, yet often searing, contemplation of the place of the individual within the natural world. The poet’s astonishing command of language, the dexterity of her use of punctuation and space, the precision of her craft, meld in the creation of these create beautiful, haunting poems that touch the reader at their deepest level.
Source: Turas Press
Read More: https://turaspress.ie/shop/third-turas-press-poetry-collection-from-irish-poet-chris-murray/
Acknowledgements for Her Red Songs, Online URL: https://textworksite.com/2023/06/12/acknowledgements-page-for-her-red-songs-turas-press-2024/
Chris Murray 