Summer in September and Other Poems
In the summer and early fall of 2015, the warmest September ever recorded in Toronto, a widow and a widower made an unusual connection. Following their meeting for the first time as single people, the pair began visiting each other, either at his place in Toronto or at her place in the Quebec countryside. They also travelled as sightseers to Montreal and to Kingston and attended a wedding at a vacation resort.
The Longest Month and Other Poems
Inside a Toronto apartment with a view of Lake Ontario and a hillside covered with trees, seasoned poet David Murray penned his tenth collection of lyrical verse—somehow meeting a lofty goal of writing one hundred poems in thirty days.
While waiting for a rendezvous at a train station with a recently widowed friend, Murray passed the time during the longest month of his life by fueling his creativity and writing mostly sonnets that cover a variety of subjects and emotions. Murray’s poems not only explore feelings of anticipation, grief and hope but also the unpredictable beauty of nature as spring attempts to make an entrance, the questions that arise while gazing at old photographs and the unforeseen as distant lovers wait for an event.
The Longest Month and Other Poems share a seasoned poet’s reflections as he contemplates the past, present and the possibilities of a new beginning.
An Apology and Other Poems
An Apology
… For all the irritations I’ve caused you,
I’m sorry; in a mirror,
My eyes might glisten with tears of fear and remorse.
For being an onerous burden upon you,
I’m sorry; in a drama,
I’d movingly exit, the back of my hand on my brow …
It is no secret that unrequited love is the most difficult kind of love there is in life. In An Apology and Other Poems, seasoned poet David J. Murray extends a lyrical apology to the heroine who inspired his writing of four previous compilations and may not have welcomed the attention.
A Bell Curve and Other Poems
In A Bell Curve and Other Poems, poet David J. Murray divides 118 short poems into seven separate sections; each section holds a common theme but includes a different number of poems from the other sections. The poems of this collection offer photographs of moments in his mental life, while the collection as a whole uses the bell-curve concept to allow him to stress the unified nature of this poetry collection.
An Artist’s Model and Other Poems
In An Artist’s Model and Other Poems, preferring to portray his model—a woman with whom he has fallen in love—in words rather than in paint, author David J. Murray off ers an extended hymn of praise to her, expressing unresolved yearning throughout.
Following a prologue setting the scene, he presents her with four gifts, each consisting of a set of twelve poems. The first set of poems describes what it’s like spending Christmas without her; the second set of poems compares her to the Greek goddess Athena; the third set of poems likens her to a ballerina; and the fourth set of poems, written in summer, compares her to the beauty of the season.
Between each set are entr’actes consisting of several poems that comment on the complexities of their situation. Th e collection ends with an epilogue that recalls the mood of the prologue.
Reflecting the conflict between Murray’s emotions and his sense of propriety with regard to his model, An Artist’s Model and Other Poems presents a cycle of poems that are unabashedly of the high-fl ung romantic genre.
Black Hole and Other Poems
Black Hole and Other Poems, a new compilation of verse by poet David Murray, focuses on the role played by hunger for power in reducing the success of heterosexual romantic relationships. Divided into four parts, this collection explores the topic in a wide variety of styles and approaches.
The first part of the collection, ‘Poems in a Lighter Vein’, interprets the familiar vampire story as being an allegory of common male fantasies of having power over many ‘brides’, and most of its verses are satirical in nature. The second part, ‘Black Hole,’ contains examples based upon Murray’s experiences of the personal power, all too easily abused, exerted by men over women.
‘Treading Water,’ the third part, describes Murray’s feelings when he found himself forced to compete with a male rival to see which of the two could exert the most power over a particular female’s affections. In the fourth and final part, ‘Bagatelles’, each poem attempts to arouse, in only two lines, core emotional responses of the kind that are usually assumed to require longer poems.
Satirical, gutsy and succinct by turns, this book explores the role of power in sexual relationships and the varying aspects of that power.
Pursuit and Other Poems
Pursuit and Other Poems offers a new collection of poetry presented in two parts, each of which highlights an extreme event that is part of a romantic experience. The first part is entitled “Ode in Emerging from an Overdose,” a single long poem that describes author David J. Murray’s feelings when he was rescued from an unpremeditated suicide attempt. The second part is entitled “Pursuit” and contains 114 poems that chronicle Murray’s emotional experiences with unrequited love.
Deeply personal and yet universal in nature, Murray’s verse speaks to the hope and heartbreak of the human experience with love.
Persistence and Other Poems
In his fifth volume of lyrical expressions, award-winning poet David Murray combines both traditional and free verse while exploring the powerful emotions behind the timeless theme of romantic love.
Over some fifty years, Murray has been writing and compiling poetry relating to remorse, regret, and rejection. As he returns emotionally to the times of his youth and his memories of discontent during two unhappy romances that took place during the 1960s, he offers a compelling glimpse of moments in relationships that erratically vacillate between despair and elation. His verse traces the story of two people who fall in love, evolve as a couple, and realize in the end that sometimes love fails.
The poetry in this memorable collection will remind anyone that love—like life—is unpredictable.
Celebrations and Other Poems
Explore the feelings of a man who is like many others: He feels guilty about being attracted to someone other than his wife.
It’s during these moments that he clamps down on his desires, knowing that it could endanger his marriage and family life. But still, his responsibilities as a parent have him wishing he could escape into the arms of another. Find out how he battles through his urges in this book’s first selection of poems, titled “Trepidations.” With moving candor, he delves into his moments of mental infidelity to his wife. The poet follows that up with “Celebrations,” a second grouping of poems in which he expresses his appreciation to his loving wife.
Using a stylistic approach dubbed “cosmopolitan formalism,” these poems are meant to appeal to all people, regardless of their gender, sexuality or background. Weed through the tricky problems of a serious relationship and find a love that lasts in Celebrations and Other Poems.
War-Wise and Other Poems
Written with language that works in harmony with the rhythm of the poems, seasoned poet David J. Murray offers his third collection of work in War-Wise and Other Poems.
Presented in two parts, the first set, War-Wise, contains thirty-five poems reflecting Murray’s memories of life in Manchester, England, during World War II—a war that began when he was two years old. Emitting clear and powerful imagery, some of the titles are straightforward narrative. Others are more reflective and address the effect the Holocaust had on his eight-year-old mind.
Surface Tension and Other Poems
The 145 short poems in this volume deal with certain problems concerning human relationships that seem particularly frequent in the western industrialized world at the present time.
The volume starts with a collection of 117 poems entitled SURFACE TENSION. Monologues in which the author relates his inner states of emotion to events in Nature are alternated with shorter and more lyrical poems. In the first ‘movement’ the sea is used to symbolize conflicts between men and women in a partnership. In the second movement, the earth is used to symbolize conflicts within an individual over how far he or she should allow intellectual concerns to win out over romantic concerns (or vice versa). In the third movement, air and sky are used to symbolize the states of relative peace (interspersed with moments of storm) that can arise in a relationship between two people with similar ideals.
confusion matrix and other poems
David J. Murray’s Confusion Matrix and Other Poems is a collection of poetry that weaves together many different components of life using the thread of our most unavoidable emotion-confusion. Language and content combine beautifully as Murray seamlessly blends concrete detail into abstraction. This mellifluous marriage of the tangible and the universal shows that confusion is an emotion as valuable to the human experience as fear or grief or even love. We move smoothly from one aspect of life to another, from one poem to the next, carried along by the familiar and inevitable undercurrent of confusion.
The title work, “Confusion Matrix”, takes us on a winding, existential path through the confusion created by man’s examination of nature, love and life itself. This epic saga is followed by ten sets of poems, each with a specific theme, including art, music and even madness. Whether about a change in seasons or an unthinkable tragedy, Murray’s extraordinary poems speak to the questions we all ask ourselves during the most quiet and thoughtful moments in life.