Joan Murray

The first appearance of this award-winning writer's work since the 1940s, this collection, which includes an introduction by John Ashbery, restores Joan Murray's striking poetry to its originally intended form. Though John Ashbery hailed Joan Murray as a key influence on his work, Murray's sole collection, Poems, published after her death at the early age of twenty-four and selected by W. H. Auden for inclusion in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, has been almost entirely unavailable for the better part of half a century. Poems was put together by Grant Code, a close friend of Murray's mother, and when Murray's papers, long thought to be lost, reappeared in 2013, it became clear that Code had exercised a heavy editorial hand. This new collection, edited by Farnoosh Fathi from Murray's original manuscripts, restores Murray's raw lyricism and visionary lines, while also including a good deal of previously unpublished work, as well as a selection of her exuberant letters.

"One of the few poets whose work remains accessible to both scholars of poetry and the casual reader...Her finely wrought free-form verse reads as easily as prose despite its dense, lush imagery."--The Harvard Review "Working in free verse, Murray is a master of the single unforgettable detail. Her accessible image-driven narratives harness the urgency of their moral or social context while staying true to the pacing and music of daily life."--The Poetry Foundation (publisher of Poetry magazine) Swimming for the Ark demonstrates why Joan Murray is praised as one of the leading narrative poets of our time. This career-defining book offers twenty-two new poems along with generous selections from her earlier books: The Same Water (winner of the Wesleyan New Poets Series), Looking for the Parade (winner of the National Poetry Series Open Competition), Queen of the Mist (the Niagara narrative which won her a Broadway commission), and Dancing on the Edge. This highly engaging book vividly dramatizes an urban youth and a rural life, along with deeper concerns about history, art, and injustice. From "Doorway": Of course we said we'd help you-- the cops were after you, you said, and we were rebel girls, weren't we? the four of us fifteen, the same age you said you were, when we crammed together in the doorway of a gated store, the windows full of knives, vibrators, transistor radios. I was the only one who understood: Lemony blond, sweet-voiced for a boy, you hid behind our Tangee lipstick, our teased-up hair-dos, the wispy-angora sweaters I can see in the photo-booth photos I still have here ...Joan Murray is the author of four prize-winning collections (from W. W. Norton, Wesleyan, and Beacon Press). She has been a repeat guest on NPR's Morning Edition and is editor of the Poems to Live By anthologies and The Pushcart Book of Poetry.

One of the first women artists in Canada to receive international recognition, Laura Muntz's evocative paintings of children and childhood have been exhibited worldwide. In this overview of Muntz's life and work, Joan Murray captures the breadth and sophistication of Muntz's oeuvre. Trained in France and inspired by the Impressionists, Laura Muntz (1860-1930) imbued her paintings with a striking, atmospheric treatment of light. Energetic and determined, Muntz created a large number of canvases, watercolours, pastels, and drawings that communicate a deep sympathy with her subjects - most often children or women with children. As she continued her career in Toronto and Montreal, her works revealed flair, inventiveness, and a rich sense of colour and layering. Muntz lived and painted in Canada to the end of her life, exhibiting widely to considerable renown. Laura Muntz Lyall: Impressions of Women and Childhood provides an extensive chronology and exhibition history, as well as the artist's own words in a selection of previously unpublished correspondence. Reproducing more than ninety paintings in colour, this book offers new insight into the work of one of Canada's important artists.

In this allnew sequel to the Beacon bestseller Poems to Live By in Uncertain Times, editor Joan Murray has once again gathered an astonishing group of poems that speak to our personal and shared concerns in a troubled time. Poems to Live By in Troubling Times features works carefully selected and deftly organized to help guide us through the complexities of our current situation. Included are poems that speak to our anxiety and terror; rally our hope and courage; warn us of complacency and complicity; stir us to action and compassion; lead us to question our leaders and politicians; move us to meditation and prayer; urge us to confront war and violence; and give us hope for peace and justice. Readers will find wisdom to sustain them as they face difficulties in their individual lives or confront our common contemporary predicament. These are not poems that provide easy answers or overheated rhetoric but poems that speak directly and deeply to the soul, from the most important and celebrated poets of our era.

In her haunting fourth collection, National Poetry Series winner Joan Murray takes the challenge of performing poetry's original and still necessary tasks in the uncertain landscape of a new millennium. Widely praised for the exceptional humanity and technical virtuosity of her earlier collections, Murray now explores the daily struggles of life and death in the natural world, the hidden pleasures and ironies of life in small-town America, the vulnerable underside of artistic communities, and the myriad complexities that pervade our dreams and relationships in this new century. With wit, generosity, and unflinching honesty, Murray gives us poems that mourn and praise, illuminate and challenge.

She then turns inward to examine herself as an artist and a woman. In the final section she celebrates the courage that allows us to be death's great opponents.