February 26, 2006

Ryan Murphy, Down with the Ship (Seismicity, 2006). 66 pages. $11.95.

Down with the Ship is a solid first book. Murphy's lines continually reinterpret themselves, change gears, and take the poems out for walks, the trajectory usually plotted non-linearly and far from their point of origin:

You're darking and coffee
the bedpost my pinion,
my stevedore. Allay always.
Offer up everything: truth

be told I'd rather
be fishing,
and so on (Stalwart and Floodtime Time, ll. 1-7).

The section "Poems for Pitchers" (25-33) is so good with it's reuse and recontextualization of phrases and lines: Compare the opening two lines of "Dear Roger Celemens"

New York is eternity,
it is a monument (25).

to the opening of "Dear Sandy Koufax"

We threaten eternity with our monuments (27).

to line 6 of "Dear Fidel Castro"

History is a poor eternity (31).

Such play/structure runs successfully throughout this section.

Available through SPD.