Shortlisted for the Irish Times Literature Prize in Poetry, 2001

"Where should one begin to impress the importance of Murphy for anglophone poetry in general? ... With the publication of this book the time has come to instate Richard Murphy as one of the most important Irish poets of the last century." Sewanee Review

"His poems, often in terza rima, rhymed quatrains and septets, and sonnets, are for lovers of traditional poetry, for thoughtful readers with a sense of history and a feel for the beauty of the English language. ... This is a superior book of poetry." The Philadelphia Inquirer

"... [He has] a Yeats-like mastery over theme and poetic form as the way and the means for transforming personal experience into 'the artifice of eternity.'... Murphy's poems register with a cumulative weight and density approaching the monolithic. This publication of his Collected Poems begins to give this poet long-deserved recognition." Boston Review

from Seals at High Island

At nightfall they haul out, and mourn the drowned,
Playing to the sea sadly their last quartet,
An improvised requiem that ravishes
Reason, while ripping scale up like a net:
Brings pity trembling down the rocky spine
Of headlands, till the bitter ocean's tongue
Swells in the cove, and smothers their sweet song.

$28.95 cloth
ISBN 0-916390-98-5
ISBN13 978-0-916390-98-3

$18.95 paper
ISBN 0-916390-97-7
ISBN13 978-0-916390-97-6

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