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Poets and Poems: Nancy Murphy and “The Space Carved by the Sharpness of Your Absence”

By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

Leaves in frost Nancy Murphy The Space Carved by the Sharpness of Your Absence

In her poetry, Nancy Murphy comes to terms with relationships.

A marriage fails. A mother dies. An only child goes off to college. A father’s health is failing. No one ever said life was easy, and we all seem to spend considerable time making sense of our lives and especially our relationships with loved ones and friends.

It’s what poet Nancy Murphy does in The Space Carved by the Sharpness of Your Absence, her first poetry collection. She describes loss, separation, grief, and pain; the measure of those emotions can be seen in the title, “the sharpness of your absence.” You might think loss dulls with time, but Murphy reminds us that many things can suddenly make the loss piercingly real all over again.

The poems exhibit a spareness; Murphy says just enough and no more. They also display a bare-bones honesty; she understands that failure in relationships is rarely one-sided. In “Betty, Poolside,” she tells a friend that she left her husband “because / he would not swim naked with me / in the dark in the pool behind / the fence at our house.” It’s a surprising reason, perhaps, but her words, like so many of her poems, imply far more than what they say.

Several of the poems are about Murphy’s mother, whom she lost relatively young, right after her own daughter was born. The poems about her mother and her father deal with memory and even identification. It may be a truism, but as we age, we see more and more of our parents in us.

Field of View

The Space Carved by the Sharpness of Your Absence Nancy MurphyI am a stretched canvas. My mother’s
yearning background color. Dress dusty

pink the color of my first ballet slippers,
hair putting up a fight. Thin black belt around

my nickel of a waist, it takes me years
to become a body. A girl even longer.

The field is everything to me. The way sunlight
wakes up the colors, the way the hint

of a road slices space into before
and after, the way home keeps moving

away. Collapsing onto the grass,
oblivious to how it can stain you,

mark you as a child. When do we start
seeing the world as wide than we can

hold? I paint myself away from the edges
of the picture, on another coast, different

weather. I pint the story of my mother
and what she wanted. I remember when

she gazed on me, and when she gazed not
on me. I carry hollowness into the rain.

Nancy Murphy

Nancy Murphy

Based in Los Angeles, Murphy has published poems in the Gyroscope Review, SWWIM Every Day, The Baltimore Review, The South Carolina Review, Stoneboat Literary Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, and several other magazines and literary journals. She also serves a mentor for teens as a long-term volunteer at WriteGirl. She’s also written for and performed in solo shows such as the Hollywood Fringe Festival. Murphy grew up in New York and received a B.A. degree in American Studies from Union College in Schenectady, New York.

The Space Carved by the Sharpness of Your Absence tells us much about our own relationships, reminding us of what we’ve lost and what we’ve retained. There’s conflict here, but there’s also resolution and acceptance.

Photo by Broom_am (Andy B), Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

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Glynn Young
Glynn Young
Editor and Twitter-Party-Cool-Poem-Weaver at Tweetspeak Poetry
Glynn Young lives in St. Louis where he retired as the team leader for Online Strategy & Communications for a Fortune 500 company. Glynn writes poetry, short stories and fiction, and he loves to bike. He is the author of the Civil War romance Brookhaven, as well as Poetry at Work and the Dancing Priest Series. Find Glynn at Faith, Fiction, Friends.
Glynn Young
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