What We're Left With - Softcover

Ben Murray

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1897142293 ISBN 13: 9781897142295

Publisher: Brindle & Glass Publishing, 2007

Synopsis

The poems in Ben Murray' s debut collection, What We' re Left With, reflect on disconnection as a feature of contemporary urban experience. Murray' s poems tackle themes of isolation, loneliness and human separation from nature. Murray creates trademark images of surprising loneliness and suburban angst: sog-white mornings/ of caffeinated mouths/ mating Cheerios/ O to empty O. The poet longs for mall-free days of sprawling languid under a pre-cancerous sun when we hurry up/ and wait, to become men. Writing about climate change, the poet asks how long until hibernating bears/ shake November from their sleep-under fur/ and start snorting around for off-season/ bargains. Capable of many different registers, Murray writes, in assumed voices, of grief and memory beyond his own immediate experience, something he describes as tapping into some larger collective autobiography.

About this title

About the Author

Peter Murray was born in Vancouver on July 25, 1928 of Scottish-English descent. With 30 years experience in the newspaper business, chiefly with the Victoria Times Colonist. Peter Murray also edited a volume of the collected columns of Jack Scott, called Great Scott!, and a collection of M.A. Grainger's previously uncollected writing entitled Riding the Skyline. The Vagabond Fleet is Murray's history of West Coast sealing schooners and the dispute between Britain and the United States in the 1880s and 1890s over what is known as ""pelagic sealing"". During the ""Bering Sea"" controversy, Britain and the United States came close to war over the hunting of fur seals in open waters. A fleet of 150 sailing vessels converged on Victoria to hunt the northern fur seal. An international treaty in 1911 finally slowed the slaughter. Many of the seals that were killed indiscriminately sank before they could be recovered. Home from the Hill is a 'triography' on biographical materials pertaining to the lives of M.A. Grainger, Clive Phillips-Wolley and Warburton Pike, all of whom were authors who wrote about British Columbia.

About this edition

• Publisher: Brindle & Glass Publishing
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1897142293
• ISBN 13: 9781897142295
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96