George Murray’s Jewish Melodies
Review by Michael Greenstein
George Murray’s wit is on display in most of his poetry, which may be connected to his act of witnessing; that is, the poet’s power of observation is angled in such a way as to comment on his persona’s oblique perception. These witty angles are featured in several of his unusual “Jewish” poems.
In contrast to Allen Ginsberg’s prolonged “Kaddish,” Murray’s pointedsonnet, “The Narcissist’s Kaddish,” splits each line to create an incantatory effect as well as a gravestone marker in this moment’s monument. Empty spaces in the middle of each line highlight edges of reading experience. His witty eulogypenetrates the schism of a split personality wedged and witnessed from sidelinesand sightlines:
By this hillock he lies, for like others
in self-love he drowned in the idea
of life’s impermanence:
“Lies” refers not only to his resting place, but also to his self-deception. An accumulation of l’s teases immortality, only to be arrested by the assonance of love and others, followed by brother and son.
husband, father,
brother, son in every role a piece
of himself that would live on in memory.
All of these roles militate against resting in peace, while the pieces of self are manifest in blood, hazel eyes, dark hair, and beautiful face. “Yahrzeit and blood” combine time and ritual through the bloodline of those who recite and remember. “Mountains turned to hills” also turn back to the opening hillock.
so for shivah
we cover the mirrors, & say farewell,
The narcissistic mirror gets covered, while the poet’s peripheral vision penetrates any mask of pretension:
praying that while these carved words may one
day fade, they will never be indistinguishable
from the beautiful face of stone.
Like Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” the face fades along with carved words of kaddish, as Murray recovers a self-reflexive mirror during a week and year’s mourning.
“An Egyptian Soldier on the Red Sea Swims Away from Moses” imaginesthe historical Biblical narrative in tercets and rhythmic pentameters that dramatize urgency:
Even before the swells began to crash back in
I had a bad feeling about the situation, but under orders,
persisted as any good soldier would: pressed on
The sounds of the situation capture the dramatic moment: a phalanx of b’s (before, began, back, bad, but) and s’s (swells, situation, persisted, pressed, soldier) wave against vowels – short a’s, good, would, before, order, and soldier. This quiet cacophony presses on to the next stanza in Murray’s monologue of order and disorder:
regardless of high walls of black water groaning
and straining as though against the side of an invisible
but poorly constructed dike.
The soldier’s peripheral vision penetrates invisible edges of experience. This well-constructed sentence ends with sounds of water and invisible simile, while the next sentence begins with “So far ahead” to pulse into the next stanza:
we could never have caught them anyway, the excited
roar of the Jews, scrambling out of the trench
of sea, tipped off some engineers’ instinct
Tip and trench resound in the roar of water, the tension between land and sea, and an engineer’s instinct for well-constructed dikes. Under orders but not under water, the soldier engineers and wedges his way out of calamity.
Short i’s lead to longer i’s in the next stanza as the Egyptian outsider strips to save himself from drowning:
in my mind and I began to divest myself of metal –
first my sword, then my shield, then bronze pauldrons
and the ringing helm of solid copper on my head.
In the heroic sinking of heavy metal, the soldier finds freedom from the ringing sounds of bronze pauldrons and other imperial trappings. They sink and remain among skeletons and fish, rotting to a coral green “in the salt of that angry / and insulted tide.” Salt within insult rubs into wounded pride and angry green. Instead of any Hebrew calling, the Egyptian turns to his own people:
my people have embraced range from fishwife
to concubine, potter to soldier, farmer to Pharaoh –
every soul raised in the Delta, Egyptian or Jew.
Long a’s in embraced and raised resonate, for “embrace” appears later in the poem, while raised contrasts with sinking in the sea.
After naming parts of armour, the soldier lists the particulars of flooding: “it starts with / starry signs that pock the pupil of sky, a fetid thickness / of air, a deep humming of insects.” Aside from the sly visuals of the sky with pocked pupil as skewed witness, these omens recall the plagues and lead to the second embrace: “I was given a vision and embraced / my new position under the sun: that of prognosticator, / diviner, augur of water to cleanse the land --.” From hindsight to insight and foresight, the soldier envisions his new identity in a series of identitiesthat encompass Joseph and Moses: “the only Egyptian naked enough before the fist/ of the Jewish god, the only one unidentifiable / in the roiling waves.” He is the only one “to be left floating, alive, head bare / under the burning Eye of Re -- / tattooed arms free to strike out in any direction for land.” The Jewish god’s fist fights against the Eye of Re and the free arms of the Egyptian who may strike outof luck or head towards freedom. The repetition of “under” throughout the poem places the dramatic situation at a precarious edge of understanding and undermining, while the panoptic Eye of Re highlights the visual nature of Murray’s wit and witnessing in different directions.
“A Ninevite Pedagogue Relates the Lesson of Jonah” follows a similar pattern of exposing an outsider. Tetrameter tercets form the mode of pedagogy:
Sixscore thousand strong then, we heeded,
by royal decree, the words of warning
brought to us from another land –
Dashes extend the foreign territory to echo “Ozymandias”’ “antique land,” while sibilance stretches the population, held in check by long e’s in heeded decree, and alliterated words of warning. The royal decree contrasts with Jonah’s still small voice, as Murray’s commentary works through ancient events, giving a sense of daily life in Nineveh. His wit penetrates the second stanza:
better safe than smitten, we agreed,
by an undisclosed calamity
sent by a god known for his cleansing.
The people are a parable, “a teacher’s tool,” like the “shrivelled gourd / above the prophet and the enormous fish // in whose belly he induced pain and vomiting.” This expulsion results from the contrast between enormity and shrivelled entity in Jonah’s emetic and emotive lesson. The poet observes the prophet’s lookout on the hill and teaches a lesson.
“Lot’s Eurydice” conflates Hebraic and Hellenic myths of female perceptionin Murray’s apostrophe of possession.
The world changed as I stared
it right in the face, absently
humming the song that got me
Enjambed lines capture the change, the transformation from flesh to salt, the frozen stare against the humming song of Hades with Lot replaced by Orpheus. The second stanza uses a simile to compare ancient myth and ordinary situation: “Like a wife drawn / out of her old world and ageing / into a new beauty.” The next stanza doubles the dramatic look: “nothing / looked different until I looked / back while walking away.”
In the second half of the poem her “new beauty” reappears: “Soon, I’ll get a set of new / nows, but will only ever / want a single then.” Murray measures time in trimeters, tercets, and grasped onomatopoeic k sounds: “that one tick of the clock / in which she too risked it all / to look back at me tagging along.” The speaker is another onlooker in the trail of retrospection. The penultimate flowing stanza leads to a final stanza of strong stops: “I was in tune. I was strong / and I was tall. A pillar not yet gone / to dust. Like I remember myself.” The final simile returns to the self, where the earlier simile had distanced a wife. Murray dusts off the pillar to restore a life or two. From narcissist to Nineveh, grip’s wit seizes the moment and stares it down.
About the Author
George Murray is the award-winning author of eight books of poems and aphorisms as well as a book for children. His poems have appeared in magazines and journals around the world. He grew up in rural Ontario and has spent time abroad in Italy, Mexico, and New York City but now calls St. John’s, Newfoundland, his home.
About the Reviewer
Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke). He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.
Book Details
Publisher : ECW Press (Sept. 7 2021)
Language : English
Hardcover : 216 pages
ISBN-10 : 1770415335
ISBN-13 : 978-1770415331