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Science of Desire

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THE GEORGIA REVIEW was right on target when it said that Murphy's poems are "confident, surprising, and smart...entertaining [and] thought-provoking" and that she "elevates the anecdotal to an artform." A less sophisticated reader may miss the subtle epistemological questions and issues presented by these poems. The subject matter varies widely, from Descartes to "Studies," a poem that deals with the clinical and emotional effects of Alzheimer's disease. The title poem is a tour de force. Here's a teaser (in more ways than one!):

"There's a fine
line between causal
and casual.
Her spaghetti strap
hesistates on her
shoulder like
an unanswered
question. He is
thinking 'lingerie'
is the perfect
word: 'linger'
all dolled up
in French perfume.
Linger with
an attitude.
'Linger' like the
finger that will
help her silk camisole
make up its mind..."

(from "Science of Desire," p. 51)

What is a poet, anyway? It's someone who uses all the tools of language to observe and explain what we all wish and long for. In her first book of poetry, Erin Murphy nails it with the title, Science of Desire, two seeming opposing views of the world. Science, on the one hand, which has come to mean a systemization of knowledge divorced from philosophy. And, Desire, on the other, which is all about feeling and want.

But in the poet's world, through the careful play between words and images and people, everything is turned upside-down and great questions are answered.

In "Descartes Lover," the father of modern philosophy is left to wonder whether he would "think therefore I'm a yam, or a ham, or a jar of jam" if his dead child had lived. Perhaps Descartes could have "seen that perfection can come from things imperfect."

"Studies," a poem about Alzheimer's, shows how words lose their meaning when the victims of the disease lose their memory, "This you, I mean, then you, I mean...I don't remember what I mean." Or do words lose their meaning? Even though the "victims' pasts are erased entirely...You remember the way he screamed in a whiskey rage over your broken bike, then replaced it the next day, no apologies."

Or in "Satellite," where a child watches her father and the satellite that he constructed through the same lens, "quivering between fullness and the outline of a solitary zero." The eyes of her father that "blink slowly, never closing all the way but never really opening" are the movements of the satellite that "sift in and out of clouds the way a dolphin parts the waves."

And so in this very intelligent collection of poetry, Erin Murphy uses her craft, as only a great artist can do, to dig beneath the surface and elevate the mundane to a whole new metaphysical level where the unity of opposites can reign supreme. Bravo.