Robert Murphy
LIFE IN THE ORDOVICIAN: Selected Poems

Dos Madres Press
ISBN 10: 1-933675-31-4
ISBN 13: 978-1-933675-31-2
Paper, 122 pp, 6x9
$14.95

Poems written over the last twenty-five years.  A language at once lush, elegiac, and personal, where the sacred is married to the everyday.  

“These are poems of great courtesy, of hospitality: they invite us in. We find ourselves in a world where the natural surround yields almost imperceptibly to the precincts of the householder, and vice versa. The gardener, the naturalist, the quiet but acute observer of the local flora and fauna, intimate with what lives and grows within a few hundred feet of his door, returns in these poems to the mythic realm that has always belonged to him by right. And just as the line between the natural and the domestic gracefully wavers here, so too does the border between mythic truth and immediate observation.” —Norman Finkelstein

Robert Murphy’s poems have appeared in the literary periodical Smartish-Pace, as well as the Colorado Review, the Notre Dame Review, The Cultural Society, and the Chicago based journal LVNG and he is the author of a chapbook, Not For You Alone (Dos Madres, 2004). He is a 2000 winner of the William Bronk Foundation prize for poetry.
POETRY