Peter Murphy takes us on a journey of cosmic stories
You Too Were Once on Fire: Poems, the new collection by Peter Murphy, begins almost biblically with the introductory poem “The Diaspora of Light.” It echoes the “Let there be light” line from the book of Genesis, although the poem begins by citing Plato. It then moves to the stars, followed a leap to “The God Nobody Wanted,” with the convicting line of “What will it say on your tombstone / other than consumer?”
These first few poems of the collection show how important introductory poems are. You read and digest them, and you come to expect (or read into) questions of faith and contemporary society no matter what the poem’s subject is.
And the subjects do change. Murphy describes how the fact that 24-hour bars in Atlantic City have three happy hours allows him to pursue happiness (a la the Declaration of Independence) whenever his shift lets out. He wanders like Frank O’Hara through New York, ignoring the news on Fox and CNN, “listening / instead to Rachmaninoff / and the Milky Way.” He considers a beauty pageant to select “Miss Besieged Sarajevo” in 1993, the winner being “blond and shrapnel scarred.”
He continues to explore the disconnect between what is and what is supposed to be. A prisoner is questioned with torture; bombings transform a definition of terror; a house burns as the people inside go on about their regular activities. The ideal is stuck in our heads while we live the real.
And it’s not only the ideal. Even an ordinary day at work becomes something else entirely.
Spontaneous Combustion
It was an ordinary day at work, he thought,
when he felt the first thump in his chest.
He paused, as if hit with the tip of a pointer or a cane.
Excuse me, it said, and he gave it his attention.
What now? What do you want?
Don’t worry, it replied. I’ll make it quick.
And it did, exploding throughout his chest,
making it a chest of fire, a whole house of fire,
burning the oxygen out of his lungs.
No, he shouted. Not now! Not now!
but it said nothing. It didn’t need to speak.
It had no need for words of any kind.
No, No, he thought he said, but he hadn’t.
He just lay there ablaze, giving in.
He wanted to say, All right, you said
you’d make it quick.
But he didn’t say that either.
Peter Murphy
Murphy has previously published 12 poetry collections, chapbooks, and works of nonfiction. His poems have been published in several literary and general magazines, including the Michigan Quarterly Review, North American Review, New Welsh Reader, The Sun, Guernica, The Literary Review, and others. He served as an educational advisor to three PBS programs on poetry produced by Bill Moyers and has received several fellowships and writing residencies. He’s led hundreds of workshops for writers and teachers, and he is the founder of Murphy Writing of Stockton University in Atlantic City.
It’s something of an understatement to say You Too Were Once on Fire is unsettling. People of faith would say we live in a fallen world; others might say the real is growing ever more distant from what should be. But as Murphy’s poems show, all of us share the sense of things coming undone.
Photo by greg westfall, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
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