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What We're Left With
by Ben Murray
The debut collection from a poet with a broad and relevant vision
Ben Murray is a storyteller with an innate understanding of how to deliver redemption in a line of poetry. His is a voice that
carries.
-Linda Rogers
The poems in Ben Murray's debut collection What We're Left With reflect on disconnection as a feature of contemporary urban experience. Murray's poems tackle themes of isolation and human separation from nature. Murray creates trademark images of surprising loneliness and suburban angst: "sog-white mornings/ of caffeinated mouths/ mating Cheerios/
O to empty O." The poet longs for "mall-free days" of "sprawling languid under a pre-cancerous sun" when "we hurry up/ and wait, to become men." Writing about climate change, the poet asks "how long until hibernating bears/ shake November from their sleep-under fur/ and start snorting around for off-season/ bargains." Capable of many different registers, Murray writes, in assumed voices, of grief and memory beyond his own immediate experience, something he describes as "tapping into some larger collective autobiography." In the title poem, the speaker tries to remember:
my brother who died somewhere unpronounceable
for no relevant reason
try to remember the look of surprise
blown by un-blue skies
that I've never seen, will never see
instead I always come back to the apples
apples bloating our summer bellies,
the way we'd bite into them hard
and thirsty, sleeving the drip
from our lips, tongue-teeth piercing
the hard vulnerable skins
until only the cores remained,
bruising fast, in the revealed air
From "What we're left with"
Ben Murray's poetry has appeared in a wide variety of journals including
Descant, Event, Prairie Fire, CV2, and the
Windsor Review, and has been widely anthologized. The title poem for this collection won the CV2 Poetry Award in 2001. His work has been broadcast on CBC radio, and he is a winner of the Canadian Poetry Association Award for Poetry, and recipient of third place honours in the Petra Kenney International Poetry Prize. This is his first full-length collection of poems.
