Golden Milk

Sheila Murphy writes of "The stasis I so love that tunes me to attunement," yet Murphy has always defined the tune, tuned the tune. She has, since I have known her work in the mid-1980s, been the consummate poet, a "poet's poet" because her chords, her lines, her diction, syntax, and formal perfection serve as a model, and we learn. But here, in GOLDEN MILK, she risks the untuning, the dis- or re-alignment, all the uncertainties of our world, our moment in the world. And she is very much in the world, its colors, its "woods and blooming pine," its reality and its "shadow artistry." She says we do things "within the confines of this monsoon weather" (something she well knows in her desert realm), yet she transcends weather, transcends "veritas" to move into possibility. Her sensuous clasps, kissing, and myriads of strings are well plucked here. Murphy has always been a brilliant poet and a poet of brilliance, in light and song, yet here she goes somewhere else, wings out, she flies, as she cries "fluently in your language," leaves "work in my psyche constantly undone," yet searches and finds "contingent acts of God" in the air through which she moves. She closes the book with a request that we "Stay here with me and within hearing touch that I may breathe again." Listen to her breathe. You will breathe within the whisper through this glorious and golden book, which of course can not close, rather opens towards the light.
-CHARLES ALEXANDER [The following is another review] In many cases and as aided by an in-beat lyricism, the silk of Murphy's poems offers transparency through a lack of punctuation especially ending punctuations like periods. How appropriate given how she carves out new doors for readers' imaginations, e.g. "any time you walk vocabulary words down lanes the empty sidelines shepherd riverways where livestock and the sunlight chasten quietude"-as in quietude being the opposite of continued engagement with those "vocabulary words." When "vocabulary" becomes an adjective of "words," one notices how words don't need to rest in static definitions but can point to new ways to engage-a basic purpose to poetry if expanding vocabulary is a means of acquiring knowledge. These turns to re-exploring language as a haunting are illuminating, steeped as they are by experience and maturity. Murphy is incandescent through a prolonged and "effervescent fealty" to poesis that melts previously-defined words into something ineffable but sweet.
-EILEEN TABIOS