The Wear of My Face
The sun is our closest star just average a middle-aged dwarf past its prime but still a few billion years to go and fierce is its heat Its domains: interior surface atmospheres inner corona outer corona Did someone say Corona?
The Wear of My Face is an assemblage of passing lives and landscapes, fractured worlds and realities. There is splintered text and image, memory and dream, newscast and conversation. Women wicker first light, old men make things that glow, poets are standing stones, frontlines merge with tourist lines. Lizz Murphy weaves these elements into the strangeness of suburbia, the intensity of waiting rooms, bush stillness, and hopes for a leap of faith as at times she leaves a poem as fragmented as a hectic day or a bombed street. What may sometimes seem like misdemeanours of the mind, to Lizz they are simply the distractions and disturbances of daily life somewhere. There is a rehomed greyhound, a breezy scientist, ancient malleefowl, beige union reps and people in all their conundrums. You might travel on a seagull’s wing or wing through the aerosphere.
SEPTEMBER 2021 | ISBN 9781925950342 | Paperback | 140 x 216mm | 112 pages
Watch the book launch of The Wear of My Face. The book was launched by award-winning author and poet Merlinda Bobis on 16th September 2021.
Endorsements
The Wear of My Face is an uncanny and politically powerful collection. It traverses ‘strangelands’ that thrum with colour. Its fragments are suspended in a tender tension, much like the conundrums of the human world it explores.
— Sarah St Vincent Welch, image maker and writerThrough formal ingenuity—squares of weighted lyric/narrative play that float or as her fragments stanza themselves down the page—Lizz Murphy invites us into the solitary, sometimes dangerous human interior. She sees and hears pitch-perfect. These poems are so easily loved yet can resist, transgress, confound. Still they open with wonder from the very start where “Each word about a pear is a word out of.” Take note of her warning.
”The first bite is with a knife.”
— Marianne Boruch, author of Bestiary DarkLizz Murphy is at her best in her nature poems and double-edged domestic meanderings that encapsulate both home and planet. Whether joyful or celebratory, interrogative and political (some with kick-ass flair) or quietly aching or meditative, these poems offer a pleasurable image-insight experience. Each poem is ‘a happening’.
— Merlinda Bobis, author of The Kindness of Birds
Reviews
Lizz Murphy's latest volume of poetry deftly encapsulates our unsettled times
Murphy's eye for a truthful, pungent image is as strong as ever, and her gentle humour thankfully survives these strange times.Read more in The Canberra Times
— Penelope Wayland, The Canberra TimesFrom first poem to last, she invites us on a journey of realisation where we see fragments of a world that needs to be nurtured.
Read the full review in VerityLa
— Hazel Hall, VerityLa, edited by Robyn Cadwallader
Poet Lizz Murphy’s latest volume The Wear of My Face is a literary manifestation of the photographer’s capacity to quietly observe – everything from the banal to the exalted is the stuff of her poetry. She writes so beautifully it makes me ache.Poetry is important, less read and less published than it should be in Australia. This is one for us to read and reread, to keep by the bedside, soaking up the deliciousness of Lizz Murphy’s words, phrases and images.
Read the full review in This is Canberra.
— Barbie Robinson, This is Canberra
Review of The Wear of My Face in The Canberra Times. Read online here.
Read the Q&A with Lizz Murphy in The Belfast Telegraph here
Listen to Lizz on Spoken Word. Listen online or wherever you get your podcasts.
A two part interview with Lizz Murphy and The Monthly, the online journal of the Community Arts Partnership (CAP) in the north of Ireland. You can read and watch the videos here.
Lizz reads from The Wear of My Face for University College Dublin Library's Special Collections. Watch it here
Poetry is important, less read and less published than it should be in Australia. This is one for us to read and reread, to keep by the bedside, soaking up the deliciousness of Lizz Murphy’s words, phrases, ideas and images. She is a wordsmith extraordinaire, but so much more – her work is of substance and she most definitely a woman of substance. Read the full review here.
Lizz Murphy: Stories from the Studio
STA ‘virtually checked-in’ with Lizz Murphy to talk about poetry, inspiration and her recent publication The Wear of My Face by Spinifex Press.
Lizz Murphy introduces and reads from her new book The Wear of My Face.