Conjugations and Reiterations: Poems [Hardcover]

Albert Murray (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 13, 2001

In Conjugations and Reiterations Albert Murray, one of the premier literary men of our time, gives us his first collection of poetry. Wide ranging and informed by his singular intelligence and sensibility, these poems are extraordinary for their keen folk wisdom and striking lyricism, partaking of the idioms of blues and jazz. The vicissitudes of American life, the improvisatory nature of American art, the profundities of the Gospel and of gospel music—these are but a few of the concerns in Murray’s poetic achievement.

Conjugations and Reiterations stands in ringing confirmation of The New Yorker’s celebration of Albert Murray as a writer “possessed of the poet’s language, the novelist’s sensibility, the essayist’s clarity, the jazzman’s imagination, and the gospel singer’s depth of feeling.”

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Albert Murray's "Aubades: epic exits and other twelve bar riffs" evokes the "freight train" and "sawmill whistles" of hard labor before the "singer" gets around to romance. In the next piece, the blues are abandoned in favor of a pert, mock-officious speech peppered with civic jargon, delivering dangerously offhand opinions about scarecrows and "municipal cleanup budgets/ for red letter day celebrations/ of legendary heroic actions." In Conjunctions and Reiterations, Murray (The Spyglass Tree), a novelist and nonfiction writer and winner of the National Book Critics Circle's Ivan Sandorff Award for lifetime achievement, displays a terrific range of voice, rhythm and interest. Whether in the slow blues refrains or in a later poem that mixes academy-speak with black vernacular, his prosody always seamlessly supports his content, his eye and ear jointly keeping time.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Now in his mid-eighties, Murray is best known for his novels and essays exploring the nature of African American identity, particularly his studies in the mythic and sociological dimensions of the blues. Here he transfers the dynamics of blues and jazz music to poetry ("poetry is the supreme effort/ to make words swing"), combining strongly accentual lines and refrains with wry, scholarly observations and rhetorical panache to produce poems that just as confidently evoke fiery Sunday sermons ("Jawbone," with its amen choruses) as they do the concise playfulness of e.e. cummings ("from washington/ once a man/ and now a town/ came ellington/ once a man/ and now a sound"). Though Murray is not the first to borrow forms from musical sources, he does so with shrewdness ("indeed thelonius made music/ as some monks have always made/ and shared wine") and an unwavering sense of elegance. In "Pas de Deux (I)" he writes that poetry "is the dancing of an attitude," an aesthetic credo aptly applied to Murray's own way with a poem. Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 80 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; 1 edition (November 13, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375421416
• ISBN-13: 978-0375421419
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 4.4 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,123,587 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Supreme Effort to Make Words Swing, April 9, 2002

By 

Paul Devlin (Central Islip, New York United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Conjugations and Reiterations: Poems (Hardcover)

Albert Murray's definition of poetry is "the supreme effort to make words swing". As author of "Stomping the Blues" and one of the most insightful and brilliant commentators on jazz and American culture, Mr. Murray makes his poems swing like his hero Duke Ellington. Murray plays poetic riffs on a variety of topics which he's touched upon before in his life's work, which now contains 12 books. There's a long and beautiful poem about William Faulkner. There's a jazz riff on Eliot's "Wasteland". There is a chapter of down-home 12-bar blues verses, titled "Aubades" ("morning songs") much like the ones Murray would have heard in his youth in Mobile, Alabama in the 1920's. There are poems about love, life, death, and even a light-hearted church sermon. In terms of poetic technique, the poems are exquisitely rendered, and in terms of subject matter they are fresh and relevant not only for contemporary Americans, but for all contemporary humans. There's everything from praise for Thelonius Monk, to a debunking of Sigmund Freud, and throughout it all is the rigorous intellectual structure, vast erudition, and good-natured, hilarious barber-shop humor of Albert Murray. This is a must-have for fans of Albert Murray and fans of great poetry in general, and is a should-have for everyone!